Food

How to Make Steamed Egg

I remember my domestic helper whom I referred to as “Ah Soh” (aka Aunty in Hokkien) – that was how we called our domestic helpers back then. She was a Teochew lady who took care of us when we were little. One of the few dishes that she did so well which regretfully I only recently learnt the secret to making it – is this humble and simple steamed egg dish. It sits so well with rice as a staple, even with simple porridge (that’s another video https://youtu.be/9kwPJS0U2_4) it doesn’t disappoint. My son loves it, and now I have perfected the portions of eggs to water ratio and most importantly, the jiggle in the centre of the pudding.

Ingredients:

3 Eggs (each weighing at least 55 grams) – (Once you crack the eggs into a measuring cup, it should be about 150 ml)

150 ml Chicken Broth (naturally salted) – (it should be equal amounts of liquid compared to the liquid volume of the eggs)

Method:

  1. Crack the eggs into a measuring beaker. This is an important step because in order to make a perfectly well steamed egg pudding, the proportions should be one is to one or equal parts.
  2. Pour naturally salted Chicken Broth that you made separately on another occasion or it could be out of a packet at the store or it could be from granulated chicken stock cubes. Ensure that the saltiness of the broth is exactly what would you like before you mix it in.
  3. Mix the eggs in the chicken broth well to combine the mixture.
  4. Place the bowl in a water bath for steaming over medium/high heat for at least 10 minutes. I used a gas stove, so you may want to ensure you have the right heat if you’re using some other heating stove.
  5. Make sure you cling wrap the bowl tightly to prevent any additional moisture from entering the bowl. This will ensure that the puddling is steamed nicely and will be firm once it cools.
  6. Serve with garnish if you like.

Bon Appetit!

Assam Pedas Ikan

This is a quick and easy Assam Pedas Ikan recipe using snapper fish head, and two very basic ingredients, Sambal Hijau (bottle) and tamarind seeds (Assam). Only takes about 10 minutes to cook. I know most people would cook the red sambal version. But I love sambal hijau a lot.

First you stir fry the Sambal Hijau (green chilli paste) in a little olive oil until fragrant. About 3 tablespoons of the chilli paste . Careful to not let it burn too much. You only want the slight smokey flavour. Add 500ml of water into the wok. Then add 2 tablespoons of tamarind paste (directly from the packet). Let it simmer until the tamarind paste is well combined with the sambal broth.

Add the fish heads in and add a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of sugar. Cover the lid and turn on full fire and cook the fish for about ten minutes. Add cilantro leaves and you can serve.

Bon Appetit!

How to Make Orh Nee

I decided to make Orh Nee as a special dessert for the in-laws who were coming over for dinner, and so I googled a recipe that I thought would be just nice based on gut feel.

And guess what? My wife loves it, and she said that it brought back memories of her childhood when her mother would make it the traditional way as well. To me that’s validation.

Ingredients:

500 grams of Yam – sliced half inch thickness (make sure you weigh after peeling it)

3 stalks of Pandan Leaves – cut into 4 inch lengths for steaming with the yam slices

100 grams of Honey Rock Sugar – dissolve in 200 ml of hot water

3-4 shallots – fried in olive oil (to be used as garnish)

Method:

1. Peel/shave the yam, make sure that you weigh the yam and it says 500 grams.

2. Slice the yam into half inch thickness for steaming.

3. Cut the pandan leaves into 4 inch lengths, to be placed with the yam slices during steaming.

4. In a wok, prepare a water bath, and steam the yam slices with pandan leaves for 30 minutes.

5. After the yam slices have been softened, discard the pandan leaves and mash the yam into a pulpy texture.

6. While the yam is steaming, prepare the sugar syrup. Weigh the honey rock sugar, 100 grams and dissolve it in hot water.

7. In a blender, mix the yam pulp and pour in the sugar syrup – all 200 ml of it. Blend until smooth.

8. Pour the blended yam mixture into a bowl and let it cool down. Wrap in cling warp, ensuring that the plastic touches the surface of the yam to prevent a layer from forming.

9. Once cooled, place it in the fridge.

10. Slice the shallots and stir fry in olive oil until golden brown.

11. Serve chilled as a dessert with the fried shallots and oil as a garnish.

Bon Appetit!

How to Make Orh Nee

Japanese Ramen Broth

There is probably nothing more important than the broth in every bowl of Japanese ramen, and rightly so as every other ingredient in that bowl of ramen seems to be an accompaniment as opposed to be the star of the show. In fact, the broth either makes it or breaks it.

How to Make Your Own Dashi. https://youtu.be/CY4eRp61pr4

That’s one of the reasons why I decided to make my own dashi so that I could use it for my Japanese ramen broth and possibly make it from great to fantastic.

Uncle Ho’s Egg Fried Rice

Uncle Ho’s Egg Fried Rice

There has been much buzz over the simple and delicious Egg Fried Rice that I had to put up my simple Egg Fried Rice Recipe for all to follow as well. I am no Uncle Roger, so I cook it the way I know how and the way I know that will bring about the flavour of the dish.

I don’t use MSG (Many Sick Gourmands) in my cooking simply because if you use good ingredients, you already have the flavour embedded in the items that you use. In this recipe, I have 8 medium sized grey prawns, half a chicken breast, one length of Chinese blood sausage (my favourite), garlic, small onions, sesame seed oil and my favourite premium Lee Kum Kee light soya sauce.

And since this is all about the egg, I loaded four large eggs into the dish just so that I could see the colour of the eggs when I fried it up. It’s not as flamboyant as some other Uncle’s Egg Fried Rice, but I think my version is just as solid.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 cup of cooked rice (the rice could be left overnight in the fridge, or if you are in a hurry, you can also cook it and just throw it in) – Of course the texture is very different. No right or wrong.

4 large eggs (each weighing in at 55grams at least) – I use all the egg in my recipe just so that I could see the yellow in my Egg Fried Rice.

1 length of Chinese Blood Sausage (aka lup cheong) – this is an all time favourite ingredient for fried rice which I find a lot of folks don’t really use these days. Especially the Zi Char stall, they really sting on ingredients I feel. Remember to slice them thinly.

8 Medium Sized Grey Prawns (Fried Rice must have prawns, especially grey prawns. Again I cite the example of the Zi Char stall, and their minuscule prawn bits) – since this is for family, I whack the prawns, but rough cut them so that you can see how big they are when you’re eating them.

Half of a Chicken Breast (rough slice into chunks) – chicken breast is best for this dish. This serving of Egg Fried Rice can feed 4 persons.

4 cloves of garlic (minced fine) – the more garlic you add, the tastier the dish

2 small onions (minced fine) – same for the onions, but I only needed two for this recipe.

1 tablespoon of sesame seed oil (this adds to the fragrance of the dish)

2 tablespoons of premium Lee Kum Kee light soya sauce (my all time favourite condiment)

Method

  1. Add some olive oil into the wok – yes, I use olive oil like Jamie Oliver. Heat the wok until slightly smoky and then lower the heat. Add garlic and onions to stir fry, be careful not to burn the fine ingredients.
  2. Once fragrant, add the eggs to fry. You can break up the eggs at this point into bits or you can let it cook and congeal a little before you break it up. Up to you.
  3. Add the chicken breast pieces, prawns, and Chinese sausage slices to continue to stir fry. You can turn the heat up a little. Make sure the ingredients are cooked before adding in the cooked rice.
  4. Once the colour changes for the ingredients in the wok, add the cooked rice and continue to stir fry. If you used overnight night, the cooking will be easier. If you used just-cooked rice, it would be moist and may stick to the wok. The choice is yours. If you’re spoilt for time, just do this method.
  5. Add the sesame seed oil and light soya sauce and continue to stir fry. If you like, you can also add a little white pepper. Otherwise it is not necessary (some kids like mine can be quite picky if it is peppery).
  6. Again, you can add lots of spring onions if you like (I love spring onions, but my kid hates it, so I usually leave out the spring onions). Getting your child to eat their dinner is more important!

Bon Appetit!

Sea Snails

Sea Snails

It’s not everyday that my favourite fishmonger uncle would bring in Sea Snails, so naturally when I saw these beauties this morning, I decided that I shouldn’t hesitate and bought myself a kilogram of the shells.

Cooking them is also pretty easy. But before that, you have to soak them in water with a teaspoon of sea salt to remove any sand debris that could be stuck in the shells. Maybe after 30 minutes, you can pour them to the pot to boil until it is foamy.

Remove the shells and empty the pot of the water and replace it with a cup or two of white wine. Throw the shells back in and stir fry. Add some sea salt and black pepper. Garnish with chopped parsley. I did a simple video to show how this could be done.

Bon Appetit!

Grilled Crayfish

Grilled Crayfish

I saw some crayfish today at Market 628, and I just had to get it. 1kg $15, not sure if it was cheap or what, but when you want something, it doesn’t matter if it is expensive or not, you just go for it.

I got myself 4 large ones. I have a feeling it is gonna be shiok. The good thing about crayfish is that you don’t really need to season it all that much or even cook it for too long. The whole idea is to halve the fella with a large cleaver and then powder it with corn starch.

Then place the flesh side on the hot pan and left it sear the meat until a golden brown. Prior to that, you can fry some sliced garlic and allow that to brown a little. Add some Shao Xing Hua Tiao Jiu and some Premium Lee Kum Kee light soya sauce and watch the magic happen.

After a good two minutes of searing the flesh, just rough fry the rest of the crayfish so that it would change colour. But really, all you are interested in, is the flesh – in fact, that’s all you usually eat – everything else is shell.

Add a little white wine to scrap off the pan and you will have a flavourful sauce for the dish.

Bon Appetit!

Shoyu Ramen

Shoyu Ramen

I am lazy again today, it’s after all still covid-19 season and I don’t particularly like the smell of my face mask (even though it is a good face mask), and so here I am, writing this blog post for a recipe that I think is a no-brainer.

If there is something that I love about Ramen Noodles, it would be the simple basic types of Japanese Ramen with a basic Shoyu base. Shoyu sounds like Teochew – Si Yew – which basically means “sauce”? I am not entirely sure because I am not Teochew, I am just surrounded by that culture where I lived and grew up. Anyway, the “yu” in Shoyu means “oil” and we know oil is pressed from grains, fruits, etc.

So Shoyu watered down to my kitchen means the Lee Kum Kee Premium Light Soya Sauce that is sitting in my condiments pantry. To be honest, it tastes the same, and is probably the same. Just that it is not Japanese sounding. And for the Ramen noodles, it just means my Nongshim Korean Instant Noodles that I have in my cabinet. I usually stock these for those lazy days of not wanting to go out for my meals.

I ransacked my vegetable compartment, and saw one carrot, a punnet of mushrooms and white cabbage. And the reason became clear that I must have Shoyu Ramen for lunch.

Recipe

Ingredients

Nongshim Instant Ramen – 1 packet – (I usually boil the noodles once through to get rid of the yellow preservative)

Carrot, Mushroom, White Cabbage – some of each item will do – (cooking for one person be easy)

Lee Kum Kee Premium Light Soya Sauce – just enough in a bowl of hot water will do

Method

  1. Carve a small portion of carrot, and carve out flowers or some rough shape. I like doing that so that it doesn’t look like boring round carrot slices – which is usually the case.
  2. Slice the mushrooms – just one will do. Chop thin slices of the White Cabbage, just enough for one portion.
  3. In boiling water, cook the vegetables for about a minute or so, then take them out and place in cold water.
  4. Cook the instant noodles, and then it is ready, just place it in a bowl of hot water – with the soya sauce already added – and then decorate the noodles with the blanched vegetables.
  5. Optional: I added a hard boiled egg using my Runny Egg Yolk recipe. Kind of messed up the egg yolk part, it is supposed to be runny instead of cooked through. Oh well.

Bon Appetit!

Shoyu Ramen

Kimchi Ramen with Tamagoyaki

Kimchi Ramen with Tamagoyaki

It is a marriage of two opposing cultures – Korean & Japanese – when you add Tamagoyaki made traditionally the way Japanese chefs around the world make it, and add it unreservedly to the instant ramen (noodles) albeit Kimchi flavour with toppings of real Kimchi (Bibigo Brand). The verdict is a unanimous – shiok!

This meal is so easy to cook that it’s a no brainer. So I added the Tamagoyaki – Japanese rolled egg omelette into the noodles just to make it a little more complicated. You should check out that video to see how that was done. I did a OTS – One Take Session – on how to prepare Tamagoyaki the Japanese chef way – just to see how easy (or difficult) it is to make it. It was tough.

I used this brand of Kimchi instant noodles for my lunch today, but they also have another taste which is my favourite – Nongshim – very nice with the seasoning. For me I usually add everything in the packet to get the best out of the noodles. Some folks prefer not to add the seasoning, but I think it is perfectly fine.

However, if you add real Kimchi into the instant noodles, it literally comes alive. I bought the Bibigo brand of Kimchi as it had nice packaging – haha! – okay, I will admit it, I am shallow like that, and I was attracted by their packaging. Taste-wise, I think it was okay for my own lunch, although I would have pretty much prefer a sweeter version of it. I had another brand recently that I got from Jason’s Supermarket. Maybe I will go back there to get that brand.

The end result is a delicious bowl of Kimchi Ramen noodles with Tamagoyaki.

Happy can liao.

Bon Appetit!

Quick and Dirty Fish Head Soup

Quick and Dirty Fish Head Soup

I made this fish head soup on the spur of the moment, which is essentially the way all fish head soups should be prepared and cooked. I had already bought the fish head way in advance and it is just sitting there in the fridge waiting for the moment to be unleashed.

That in a nutshell should be how we prepare dinner. The decision process is completed the moment I opened the door to the freezer and I decided there and then that I would make fish head soup. Quick and dirty is just the expression that I like to use for dinner that is prepared under half an hour.

It’s not that far fetched considering that it is also about that kind of waiting time when you visit the fish head steamboat stall at the hawker centre, they are already all pre-prepared waiting for you to come and it is usually delivered in about that same amount of time as well.

Once you know the basics to a great fish head soup broth, the rest is as they say, clock-work. The machinery is so well oiled that you know exactly how the soup would taste like the moment you decided to cook the dish.

Recipe

Ingredients

Fish Head – Just one fish head will do for a small family. (that’s $5 bucks if you think about it compared to the $20 bucks if you ate outside)

Tit Poe – this is the key ingredient for making a great soup base, you can usually get it from the Chinese provision shop selling dried seafoods like cuttlefish, scallops, etc. Not sure what is the name of the item, but the Teocheows call it Tit Poe. Since you’re cooking for the family, make sure you get good quality ones.

Salted Sour Mustards – these days I much prefer the sour version of the salted mustard as compared to the salted version. The salted mustard here is also know as Kiam Chye in Hokkien. But the sour version is much better for fish soups. I realised this when we went to Guang Zhou about two years ago and the sour mustard also known as 酸菜 was just amazing with soup.

Leeks – or scallions as some others would call them, are great for soups, you can get them quite easily anywhere, and I like the Malaysian version as they tend to be more fragrant. Cooked in soup, they are just awesome.

Tomatoes – the simplest basic vegetable that I simply must have in my fridge, they add a variety of textures, colours and flavour to any dish I cook. With soups, they stand out really well.

Salted Sour Plums – the key to a great tasting soup if the salted sour plums (whole). These are usually soaked in brine and they really add a lot of flavour to fish dishes and especially fish head soups. I use some Chinese brand, but you could also opt to use Woh Hup brand.

Ginger, Garlic – these are you usual suspects for this dish, a must have. The garlic you can just peel them clean and drop them in, and the ginger, you can julienne them into tiny slivers. Great for getting rid of the fishy smells.

Himalayan Rock Salt – or any Sea Salt alternative will also do fine. I have been using pink Himalayan rock salt in my cooking just because it’s pink and cute, and at the same time, they say it is healthy – but that’s subjective in my opinion. I like it because I know how it would taste in my cooking and it features really well so far.

Method

  1. Boil water. Hot water must be used for cooking anything, and it’s essential. And of course, the water must cook fast for you to execute your cooking.
  2. Defrost the frozen fish heads in a large bowl or basin of water, but no need to wait until it is very softened at room temperature. Once the fish is sort of defrosted (5 minutes?) can just throw it into the pan or pot. I use a shallow pan and it works.
  3. Arrange all the vegetables, salted plums, sour mustards, condiments etc and the salt in the pan and pour the hot water in. Boil at high heat until bubbling and then turn it down. The soup should have the flavours of the tit poe, rock salt and sour mustards with the mild flavours of the fish.
  4. Once the fish head’s eye balls pop out, it is ready. Maybe about 15 minutes of cooking. Serve with rice (or porridge if you like).

Bon Appetit!

Steamed Mud Crabs

Steamed Mud Crabs

It was just after circuit breaker (only Singaporeans will know what I am talking about), and we were informed that a little semblance of life can return to normalcy, though not really all that normal. My wifey wanted to visit her parents and there was a visitation cap on the number of people that could visit seniors, and so, sonny boy and me went back to my parents place for dinner.

That morning as it was my practice to go to the wet market at Ang Mo Kio St 61, I thought that I would buy some mud crabs for dinner at my parents’ place – I bet they would love it – I love mud crabs too. The uncle that I always frequent usually sells them in his cages that he places on the slimy floors of the wet market. But the dirtiness doesn’t bother me. I love the old grind of the wet market, and the feeling of squeezing and haggling at the stalls with the aunties. Except that with Covid-19 concerns looming all around us, we had to be extra careful and maintain social distancing. It was tough.

Thankfully I have my new Copper Line mask, and that made it a little better for breathing, and it gave me the assurance of being able to remain focussed and staying safe. Although I am not really bothered by Covid-19, as I was bothered about being able to breathe through the mask.

So uncle selected the crabs for me – I told him I wanted heavy ones and that I didn’t mind paying the price for them – two would just do fine for a nice steamed mud crab dish. Or I could do Chilli Crab, but steaming style was always the best for fresh crabs as it brings out the best flavours of the sea. $30 dollars for two crabs, not bad, about 1 Kg.

Recipe

Ingredients

Mud Crabs – these are your local variety and they usually are between small to medium sized, so if you do get a large one, you should get it. I got two of them, and they were super fresh.

Garlic, Spring Onions – these are your best friends in any steam seafood dish, bruise the garlic slightly, and chop the spring onions in longer lengths.

Shao Xing Hua Tiao Jiu – I only use the most expensive bottle that I can find at NTUC, it is usually about $19 over dollars. The bottles all look more or less the same, but the price differentiates them. Of course, more expensive means better. Isn’t that the old adage?

Premium Lee Kum Kee Light Soya Sauce – I am a fan of this bottle of light soya sauce, nothing else will cut it for me.

Method

  1. Wash the crabs thoroughly, was an old toothbrush, if you have one. Give them the premium spa treatment for the sauna ritual later. Smash them good and proper, reserve the eggs (if you got the female ones) otherwise, a good smashing will help you when they are ready to eat.
  2. Decorate them with garlic, spring onions, two tablespoons of Shao Xing Hua Tiao Jiu, two tablespoons of the light soya sauce into the steaming pan. I like the metal pan that you can buy at any hardware store or NTUC.
  3. Steam the crabs over the wok for about 15 minutes over high heat and sufficient boiling water below the steamer.
  4. Serve with steamed white rice.

Bon Appetit!

Garlic Prawns Butter seared Scallops in Mushroom Risotto

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Garlic Prawn Butter seared Japanese Scallops in Mushroom Risotto

Ingredients:

Grey prawns – medium size – about as many as you like

Scallops – as many as you like

Shiitake Mushrooms – fresh – one punnet

Chinese celery – 4 stalks

Rice – uncooked – one cup

Chicken bones – 1 pack

Garlic – 6 cloves

Shallots – 4 pieces

Himalayan rock salt – 1 tsp

White wine – quarter cup

SCS butter – salted – 30 grams

Mozzarella cheese

Thyme or mixed Italian herbs (bottled)

Cracked black pepper

Olive oil

Method:

1. Boil the chicken bones to make chicken stock

2. Boil the rice in hot water for 6 minutes. Then drained and set aside.

3. Slice the mushrooms and fry it on the pan without oil to get the moisture out of the mushrooms. When fragrant, add mixed Italian herbs, or thyme, a little butter, a few slices of garlic or whole garlic and stir fry till fragrant. Then set aside.

4. Stir fry the minced shallots in a pan with a little olive oil. Sweat the onions until fragrant. Add in the blanched rice. And stir fry for a minute over medium heat. Then turn it down to low heat and drizzle a little white wine and continue to scrub the pan of the flavour.

5. As rice tends to soak up the flavours slowly, gradually ladle the chicken stock that you have been boiling on the side. Turn the fire to low for the chicken stock. Gradually stir the rice to ensure that it doesn’t burn. Once it dries up, continue to add more stock. Add the rock salt. Cook the rice (aka risotto in Italian) until it is al dente. Al dente means the rice is cooked but yet has structure. Before it reaches al dente, add the fried mushrooms, and chopped Chinese celery. Give the risotto a good mix. Taste test to ensure that it is fragrant. Once ready set aside.

6. For the garlic prawns, add oil in the pan, 1 tbsp of minced garlic, stir fry until fragrant. Then add the prawns and fry over medium heat until the prawns start to curl into the shape of the letter “C”. This means the prawns are cooked. If the prawns curl into the shape of the letter “O”, it means they are overcooked. The prawns should be juicy and cooked just nice. Plate them on top of the risotto.

7. For the scallops, ensure that they are patted dry. You want to sear them in the pan, not steam them. The scallops usually have a lot of water in them, so you really want to dry up as much moisture before adding the salted butter. The heat of the pan will add the lovely brown burn on the scallops. Plate them on the top of the risotto.

8. Sprinkle mozzarella cheese and eat.

Bon Appetit!

Rosemary Creamy Chicken Pasta​

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Rosemary Creamy Chicken Pasta

Rosemary and Chicken are like two unlikely lovers in a hot tub. They are placed there for whatever reason and then the magic happens. The rest of the graphic details are not really important. The end result is beautifully flavoured chicken. The effects are almost immediate.

Season the flesh with a little sea salt and black pepper, and you have a killer combination that is unbeatable. Now to cook it ala Michelin-star restaurant style and you have yourself a very fine meal at home.

Pair it with a sweet sparkling lychee champagne and nothing could be more perfect — except for being in the Michelin star restaurant itself.

Recipe

Ingredients

Chicken Breast Meat (skinless, just one slab can cook for three)

Rosemary (just a 2 sprigs would be enough)

Spaghetti (the cooking directions are on packaging, if it is 3 minutes, then cook to three, if it is 8 minutes, then cook till eight, one portion should be 170 grams of cooked pasta)

Sea Salt (I like the grainier crystals, but you can use whatever you like)

Black Pepper (cracked black pepper is best but if you wanna grate it by hand, do it)

Olive Oil (just enough to fry the chicken breasts will do)

Chicken Stock (I usually boil carcasses to get this, but you can buy it off the shelf at the supermarket, but the commercial ones are usually salty)

Chicken Seasoning (usually comes in powdered form, just a teaspoon will do, or you can use the sea salt. I like to intensify the chicken flavours)

Cooking Cream (just get 200 ml of it will do. No need to get the big packet types)

Garlic (3 pieces, minced)

Button & Shitake Mushrooms (2 each, sliced)

Salted Butter (just a quarter of a 250 gram slab, this is for frying the mushrooms)

Method

1. Cook the spaghetti in boiling water with a few droplets of oil and a teaspoon of salt. Cook according to the instructions on the packaging. The entire pasta must be submerged before you start the timer.

2. Once the pasta is cooked, run cold water through it to stop it from cooking further. Then add olive oil to prevent it from drying out and becoming clumpy.

3. Perform prep work on the garlic and mushroom. Mince the garlic and slice the mushroom.

4. Slice the chicken breasts meat into half by using a sharp knife cutting across the middle of the fillet with a palm down on the meat approach. Now you would have two thin chicken breast fillets.

5. Season with salt and cracked black pepper and allow it to slightly marinate.

6. Heat the griddle or flat pan with two tablespoons of oil and heat it till it is smoking. Bring the heat down to medium and then press the fillets into the pan, searing each side for 2 minutes or until the flesh is cooked through until white.

7. Make sure the fillets have a slightly brown crust with the meat cooked through. Reserve the fillets aside.

8. In the pan, pour the chicken stock, cooking cream and cook the sauce, scrubbing the burnt bits from the pan. This will make a rich sauce for your pasta. Season with a little salt.

9. Once the sauce is ready, pour into the cooked pasta noodles and decorate it with the sliced chicken fillets and serve with grated cheese and pepper.

Bon Appetit!

 

Steamed Hairy Crabs

Steamed Hairy Crabs

I wished i could say that these beauties were from Yang Cheng Lake, in Shanghai, but guess what? They were from NTUC Supermarket. Surprise surprise.

Hairy Crabs are such a delicacy that most people would go the extra distance and trouble just to take the dish. So I am now presented with the next problem. How to recreate that wonderful dish? Thankfully I have had plenty of experience cooking crabs and I bet this shouldn’t be too different from our local variety.

I say steamed it. Plain and simple. That’s always the best way to cooking anything especially seafood. Add a little cooking wine like Shao Xing Hua Tiao Jiu and you are definitely on your way to a delicious steamed hairy crab – albeit cooked in your very own home kitchen. My place is no Michelin Star, but I have cooked my way into the hearts and stomachs of many.

And for the dipping sauce, I like mine with premium Lee Kum Kee Light Soya Sauce and lots of fresh young ginger slices.

Recipe

Ingredients

Hairy Crabs – you are the one to decide how many you want to eat at a go. (NTUC Supermarket sells them “live” at SGD 5.90 each <<bargain!>> and I got 6 immediately without hesitation – $35.40! wow.)

Shao Xing Hua Tiao Jiu – pour into the tray until the crabs all get their feet drenched (the more they are soaked in the wine, the deeper the flavours when you steamed them.)

Young Ginger – 3 inches would be sufficient (julienne the ginger into paper thin slices so that they would soak in the light soya sauce)

Lee Kum Kee Premium Light Soya Sauce – just enough for dipping (I love this sauce. It goes into everything that I cook.)

Method

1. Wash the crabs, give them a shave if you really want.

2. They are alive, so leave the handcuffs on. Let’s just say they are ready to run if you cut them loose.

3. Place them in a tray or plate, drizzle enough Shao Xing Hua Tiao Jiu (aka Chinese cooking wine) until they all get their feet wet. Be generous, these guys won’t disappoint when they are fully steamed.

4. Steam them for 12 minutes. Not less; not more.

5. Slice the young ginger very thinly, and drop them into the soya sauce. Shiok.

6. Once they are steamed, just eat and dip in the sauce if you like.

Bon Appetit!

Stir Fry Peas and Oyster Mushrooms

Stir fry peas and oyster mushrooms

Stir Fry Peas and Oyster Mushrooms

I hate Peas. There, I said it. Don’t judge me. I am like a kid when it comes to vegetables that I don’t like. It’s like a magical tumble washing time machine spiralling me back to when I was just a kid.

Anyway, it’s not the world’s friendliest vegetable to eat. But my Wife bought it and she bought Oyster Mushrooms as well. And not sure if you have a sensitive palate like myself, but there is this peculiar aftertaste with oyster mushrooms. It’s just me I guess.

I was in the restaurant business a while back, and one of the few things that stood out for me were these oyster mushrooms. They were quite bland in flavour, maybe that’s why they were so easy to control in terms of how you would want to flavour it.

But putting them together with peas, takes it to a whole new level. Okay. I am an innovator in the kitchen, so I will give it a shot.

Ingredients

Peas (just ordinary peas, nothing fancy, one pack will do)

Oyster Mushrooms (just one packet from NTUC will do. Again, nothing really fancy)

Fish Sauce (use any Vietnamese make, although some folks say the “long boat” brand is good)

Olive Oil (just a little oil will do)

Method

1. Debone the Peas. There is a spine that is quite difficult to eat, so best to remove it.

2. Oil in the wok, stir fry some garlic pieces until fragrant, then fry the peas and oyster mushrooms together. Add the fish sauce and cover the lid to steam.

3. It should be done in about 5 minutes. So easy. Surprisingly nice too. 🙂

Bon Appetit!

Black Chicken Curry

Black Chicken Curry

Yes, you didn’t read wrongly and neither did you hear it wrongly. I just made Black Chicken Curry, and it is damn good. The Silkie Chicken is such a tiny little fella that the whole chicken would nicely feed one person. Of course I said that because my Wife didn’t want to even taste it, and therefore I had the entire chicken to myself. It was shiok!

The thought of cooking it in anything else other than Chinese medicinal herbs is already in and of itself sacrilegious to many. But, I am an irreverent servant-less home cook, who is always willing to test and try something different. I am almost always ready to challenge the norm. I see it as my tribute to the many who love black chicken dishes, an ode of sorts if you like to black chicken lovers worldwide.

The taste was succulent, juicy, flesh was tender and delicious. The curry blended in very nicely into the relatively skinny poultry and in just 30 minutes, even the gelatinous chicken feet were nicely cooked through.

The curry powder mix was from my mother’s favourite Indian spices lady at CCWM that she would always buy from when she wanted to make her own style of curry chicken. Add coconut milk from freshly grated coconut flesh, and basically you will have a very delicious curry chicken.

Recipe

Ingredients

Black Chicken – 1 whole (also known as a Silkie due to its silk like skin texture)

Curry Powder Mix – $2 mix enough for chicken about 500 grams (I usually get this from my mum’s favourite Indian spices aunty at CCWM)

Coconut Milk – $2 of freshly grated coconut flesh or about 500 grams (you can get this at almost any vegetable shop in the market or any provision shop that sells a mixture of dry provisions and fresh groceries)

Method

1. In a claypot, pour in 3 tablespoons of olive oil (do add more if you need) you generally want to fry the powder into a paste-like state, so the quantity of oil you would need to adjust visually. Fry until fragrant.

2. Add the black chicken pieces to combine with the paste until it is more of less covered.

3. With a cloth bag or metal sift bowl, add the freshly grated coconut flakes. Pour about 2 bowls of water and proceed to press out the coconut milk into a bowl. Then pour the milk into the claypot until it covers the chicken pieces and turn up the heat to high. Cover the lid and let it boil with steam fuming for about 10 minutes. Lower the fire to a simmer for another 15 minutes or when you begin to smell the fragrance of curry chicken.

4. Add a teaspoon of sea salt or adjust the portion until it is reasonably salted. Serve hot with steam rice.

Bon Appetit!

Black chicken pieces, cut into four pieces with skin taken off

Fry the chicken pieces and combine with curry paste

Delicious Black Chicken Curry

Cold Crabs

Cold Crabs

Nothing beats fresh of anything, especially fresh flower crabs. Just saw these beauties at CCWM this morning and I couldn’t resist getting them. Very often I would have a recipe in mind when I go CCWM, it’s easier to buy when you know what it would already taste like.

The flavour profiles in my mind were so intense I could have seared the flower crabs with my fiery eyeballs, just by staring at them. Steamed in my favourite Pu Ning Fermented Soya Beans (these are the bright yellow ones) the flower crabs would just be perfect. No words can describe.

Just ten minutes with the lid on and then allowing them to cool and finally resting them in the fridge will allow the flesh of the crabs to detach and caramelised the multiple flavour profiles that resides within the crab. Okay. The rest is immaterial because it is just garnishing that you could do without.

Cooking anything should be simple and uncomplicated and it should retain the clean signatures of the dish that we have grown to love so much. Some call this dish a Teochew delicacy, served cold with a sweet tangerine sauce on the side. It will be sheer delight to pick the flesh apart later.

Recipe

Ingredients

Flower Crabs (as many as you would like to eat, but they must be fresh)

Pu Ning Fermented Soya Beans (these fermented soya beans from Pu Ning, Jie Yang, China are unique and delicious. Usually a bright yellow and lightly salted, they add flavours to my dishes that no other fermented soya bean can do)

Sweet Tangerine Sauce (this is for dipping the flesh of the crabs, but I like the crabs without it)

Method

1. Scrub the flower crabs and keep the body parts intact. Usually the flower crabs are dead when we buy them, rarely you will get them alive at the markets so don’t worry about them not being fresh. I always get the female ones because of the eggs.

2. Place them in a tray, drizzle the fermented soya bean sauce on the crabs generously. Place in a wok and steam them with lid on for ten minutes at high heat. The water in the wok for steaming must be boiling hot.

3. When they are cooked and a bright reddish orange colour, just let them cool and allow them to rest further in the fridge. This dish is best served cold, thus the name Cold Crabs.

4. The sweet tangerine sauce can over power the natural flavours of the crabs, so I would suggest dipping conservatively.

5. You can garnish them with parsley if you like but that’s mostly for showmanship which is especially important when you have friends coming over for lunch or dinner. Otherwise, you can just serve it just like that.

Bon Appetit!

Fresh Flower Crabs

Florentine Cookies

Florentine Cookies

My colleague baked two huge bottles of Florentine cookies for the office and we have been chomping on them ever since and now working our way down the second bottle.

So I asked her for the recipe and she said, “sure! It’s a no-brainer.”

And trust me, I love a good no-brainer. Her Florentine was a deep dark brown and very neatly cut into shape. Mine was just any-o-how cut into shape with a pizza grater. And she’s right, it’s really a no-brainer. So easy to make I could literally do it in a Houdini asylum suit.

It took me about 8 minutes to bake, which was pretty quick, but I decided that 10 minutes would have made more sense for my oven. And I prefer it to be a little more baked and crunchier.

The end result was a Florentine that I could call my own. I added silvered blanched almonds, pistachio meat, pumpkin and sunflower seeds. Mix in the Florentine powder into the ingredients and it was done. Very easy to make. Plus not too sweet.

Recipe

Ingredients

Silvered Blanched Almonds – 250 grams (Phoon Huat sells everything a baker would need, Google it!)

Pistachio Meat – 250 grams (again you can get this from Phoon Huat)

Pumpkin Seeds – 125 grams (you don’t need so many of them, but they add a nice emerald green to it.)

Sunflower Seeds – 125 grams (I would have loved pine nuts, but couldn’t find any)

Sea Salt – half a teaspoon (there is a theory that said whatever sweet thing you do, you gotta add a little salt to it)

Florentine Mix – 250 grams (they only come in 500 grams packets, so you really need a good digital kitchen scale to help weigh out the portions)

Method

1. Pour all the dry ingredients into a metal mixing bowl. It can be plastic or porcelain, it doesn’t matter. Add the sea salt, and then the Florentine mix and give the ingredients a good combine.

2. Pre-heat the oven in fan mode at 180 degrees Celsius, usually about 10 minutes.

3. Spread the ingredients mix onto a baking tray lined with baking paper or grease proof baking parchment. Use a spoon to smoothen it as much as you can. Don’t worry if it is not perfect.

4. Place the tray into the oven and bake the ingredients for 8 minutes first and then moderate it if you feel like it is not as crunchy or if 8 minutes is too long. It really depends on what type of oven you have. I use my Apple Watch to do a count down timer and it’s really useful.

5. Once it is done, the Florentine powder should have melted and bonded with the ingredients. Let it cool down, which is also very fast. The cookie once cooled would be quite brittle, so if you want to cut it, you would need to be quick.

6. A pizza grater works the best. Cut it whilst it is still warm and cooling down. It would be easier to cut without breaking the cookie too much. Once it is hardened, it would quite tedious to shape the slice.

7. Another tip to ensure a beautiful Florentine slice would be to press it down with a flat surface. You could also roll a glass jar on the surface to flatten it.

8. Best served with a cup of coffee.

Bon Appetit!

Use a metal spoon to evenly spread the ingredients.

Steamed Mosaic Mussels

Steamed Mosaic Mussels

I love Mussels, especially the black lip variety, but they are rarely available in these waters. The mosaic variety are pretty and also cheaper in the sense that their shells are lighter as compared to the heavier clams that we usually would use to make vongole.

I got these from the fishmonger that I rarely buy anything from, I knew that she would sell these and bought a kilograms of these shells from her.

Not sure about you, but I am beginning to develop these wet market quirks where I have this belief that this guy or that guy sells his fish fresher and cheaper than the others. And perhaps there is some truth in that thinking as well. It seems other shoppers also tend to gravitate towards certain fishmongers and they also know it.

So these mussels were purchased not from the regular lady that I usually buy from.

Recipe

Ingredients

Mosaic Mussels – 1 Kg (these mussels are rumoured to be from the Philippines and usually don’t live very long, is that true?)

Lemongrass – 3 stalks (lemongrass adds an amazing flavour to the dish)

Young Ginger – 2 inches (julienne it, ginger helps to get rid of the fishy smells. Sometimes it is inevitable to get shells that have gone bad, so ginger really helps with that bad smell part)

Garlic – 4 pieces (slice finely, the garlic adds so much flavour to the dish that I simply can’t cook this without it)

Spring Onions – 3-4 stalks (the more the merrier as I always say. Use only the green portion discard the bottoms)

White Wine – 2 cups (the wine can be expired or some cheap bottle that you can’t finish)

Method

1. Wash and scrub these mussels thoroughly as they usually have a lot of grey colour clay embedded within their shells. Even more so, if the mussels are dead, it would be even harder to wash out the clay.

2. Ensure that they are sustained in clean water before you actually cook them. You never know when you would wanna cook them, so it would be best to keep them alive. Always consume the shells the day you buy them. The last thing you would want would be to store them in the fridge and they all die on you the next day.

3. Slice the lemongrass (wash first please) and garlic pieces, julienne the ginger and finely slice the spring onions. Reserve the spring onions.

4. In a large wok or pan, heat five tablespoons of olive oil and then stir fry the lemongrass, ginger and garlic slices until fragrant. Reserve them aside.

5. Throw all the mussels (discard the water) into the same wok, turn the heat up, and pour in about two cups of white wine (it can be expired wine) and steam the mussels until they all open up.

6. Throw in the fried ingredients, spring onions and give it a good stir to combine all the ingredients and flavour.

7. Optional: Best served hot and with a Chili padi light soya sauce dip on the side. Remember to add juice of one calamansi lime.

Bon Appetit!

Macaroni and Leeks

Macaroni and Leeks

Macaroni and Leeks

This is great for little kids. No matter how resistant they may be towards vegetables or generally anything remotely vegetable-ish, they will somehow love this simple dish.

Leeks can be one of the last vegetables in the vegetable family that any child would want to slurp up happily, but interestingly it is. The key is to cook them until they are super soft and its goodness fully extracted into the broth.

Adding leeks into the chicken soup made out of just chicken bones that you could pick up from any wet market or supermarket is probably one of the easiest and fuss free recipes anyone could do. I usually get the chicken bones from NTUC because these are generally cheaper because they go by weight. Whereas the wet market Aunty will just go by per piece.

Ingredients

Macaroni (I usually get Barilla brand pasta as I think it is the best. I could be wrong but the blue packaging appeals to me, so there. For this box of mini macaroni, the cooking time is 6 minutes. Not sure why they call it differently by another name, but just take it from me, it is macaroni.)

Chicken Bones (NTUC sells the cheapest and best chicken bones. They usually pack 2 chicken carcass into a pack and that’s sufficient for this recipe. I like NTUC’s chicken bones because they tend to leave a lot of meat on the bone which is great because for this dish, I save money by not having to buy additional chicken parts. Sometimes the chicken bones from the wet market poultry vendor can be really just bones as they are experts in removing flesh from bones. So that’s a tip for you!)

Leeks (I usually get the Malaysian variety and not the huge ones from China. These are more flavourful and delicious. But you can use the ones from China if you can’t find any local varieties at your local grocer. 4 lower ends of the leeks would flavour your broth real fine.)

Sea Salt (1 teaspoon for cooking the macaroni and another for cooking the chicken broth)

Olive Oil (a few droplets for cooking the macaroni and a few droplets for keeping them from sticking together. I know the olive oil doesn’t have a very big role in this recipe, but it is very important in making this dish work.)

Method

1. Boil a kettle of water, measure out 1.5 litres and pour it into a pot. Add chicken bones and bring to a bubbling boil. Add a teaspoon of sea salt.

2. Once broth is bubbling boiling, add the tail ends of 4 pieces of leeks. The green leafy portions you can use for something else. The flavours are usually in the lower ends of the leeks. Discard the roots. For this, lower the fire and slow cook with lid covered. Cook until the leeks are softened, chicken oils are seen in the broth. And the chicken meats are white.

3. Using a small pair of kitchen tongs, shred the chicken meat into flakes. This will later go into your macaroni.

4. Boil another kettle of water, pour into another pot. Add a few droplets of oil. Add a teaspoon of sea salt. Add the dry macaroni into the pot (for 3 persons, I cooked half a box, you might wish to cook less) and bring to bubbling boil. Set the timer for 6 minutes or as per the cooking instructions on the box.

5. Once the macaroni is cooked to al dente remove from the pot and pour the cooked macaroni into a metal strainer and douse in ice water to stop it from cooking further. Add a few droplets of oil to prevent the cooked macaroni from sticking to each other.

All that’s left is to combine the macaroni with the soup and the shredded chicken and you can serve.

Bon Appetit!

Ginseng Black Chicken Soup

Ginseng Black Chicken Soup

The best Ginseng Black Chicken Soup in my honest opinion (bet you thought I was gonna say humble, right?) is probably the stall located at Jalan Bersih (Hawker Centre). The stall on level two of the Hawker Centre sells Turtle Soup that is totally traditional and out of this world. They also sell a kick-ass Ginseng Black Chicken Soup. It’s really yummy, and the portions of Ginseng herbs is just nice and not too overwhelming.

So I decided that I would replicate that and bought my own Ginseng Beards from the supermarket. They sell a very cheap version of Ginseng Beards and for me, that will do very fine. I mean how hard can it be?

I poured half the packet into the thermal pot to make the soup. And the strength was just about right, a teaspoon of sea salt against 1.5 litres of water, and the soup would be nothing short of awesome.

After 12 hours of thermal-cooking, what turn out that evening, was a very delicious bowl of black chicken soup m, fully infused with the ginseng herbs.

If you would prefer a different taste, you may want to try my Herbal Black Chicken Soup which is equally good IMHO. LOL.

Ingredients

Black Chicken (one whole black chicken, otherwise not enough for my family.)

Ginseng Beards (get the cheapest ones at NTUC and that would be good enough for two portions)

Sea Salt (best form of salt ever, just 1 teaspoon per 1.5 litres of water and it would be Super flavourful.)

Method

1. Boil a kettle of water. Wash the chicken thoroughly, then place it into the thermal pot, then pour the boiling water into it and boil the chicken until water bubbling. Discard the water. This is to remove impurities, dirt, blood, etc.

2. Boil another kettle of water, pour about 1.5 litres into the same pot with the chicken. Add the ginseng beards. Add the sea salt. Boil st high heat for about 15 minutes with the lid covered.

3. Place the thermal pot into the thermal cooker enclosure. Leave it for 12 hours. The slow cooking process in the thermal cooker will slow cook the meats until it is tender and succulent.

When you are ready to eat at dinner time, boil it hot and eat with rice.

Bon Appetit!

Stir Fry Sichuan Cai with Minced Pork

Stir Fry Sichuan Cai with Minced Pork

My Mother came by the other day with Minced Pork for my Son who hasn’t been feeling very well since the beginning of the new year. She said minced meat cooked with porridge would improve his appetite and help him recover faster.

Now before you zip off to google the medicinal benefits of minced pork, please, get a hold of yourself. It is just minced pork.

I decided that it was far more practical to make a dish out of the minced meat rather than put it all into his porridge. For all you know he might take one look and scoff at it for reasons unknown and we would have wasted good minced pork.

Good thing wifey bought Sichuan Cai aka SiChuan Vegetables in easy to cook convenient packaging. NTUC sells it in packs of 6 sachets. And I decided to cook another all time childhood favourite Sichuan Cai with Minced Pork.

These 2-3 ingredient dishes are simple to prepare, singular in flavour, and uncomplicated in taste.

Ingredients

Sichuan Cai (aka SiChuan Vegetables. Apparently it came from Sichuan and it prepared in chilli powder to give it that spicy kick. They not offer it in spicy and non-spicy sachets, pretty good for kids)

Minced Pork (about 100-150 grams will do.)

Old Garlic (sliced thinly for best flavour. Easier to cook also via the tilted wok technique, 3 cloves would do fine)

Method

1. Sliced the garlic first, thinly for maximum effect. Then deep fry the garlic slices in about 3 tablespoons of olive oil using the tilted wok technique. If you are wondering what is this tilted wok technique, I wrote about it in my recipe Stir Fry Ladies Fingers.

2. Immediately add the minced pork, un-marinated, and start frying over low fire just to get the minced to cook slowly.

3. Once minced starts to turn slightly white from pink, add the sachet of Sichuan Cai and continue to stir fry. The saltiness of the vegetables would be sufficient for this dish and no additional seasoning is required.

Once cooked, you can have it with plain porridge. Easy.

Bon Appetit!

Steamed Snake Beans with Chinese Anchovies

Steamed Snake Beans with Chinese Anchovies

Traditionally known as the Oriental Yard Long Bean, this vegetable found commonly at the local wet market around Singapore is a well-loved vegetable by Chinese households. Actually, I am sure other households also love the vegetable, but I know I grew up eating these snake-like long Beans. And I love them.

Some folks refer to them as Snake Beans, which I kind of prefer as well. In Hokkien, we usually call it Cai Tau which literally mean Bean Vegetable.

I have always stir fried these legumes but decided that I would try steaming them instead. No special reason, just like the thought of steaming the snake beans into submission.

Ingredients

Snake Beans (the vegetable Uncle usually ties them into bunches with a rubber band, it makes it easier for him to calculate prices without having to weigh the stringy vegetables.)

Chinese Anchovies (the Malay word for these guys are ikan bilis otherwise known as mini anchovies. These are the mini-mini versions. Sun-dried and possibly full of its local sea flavour. Good to soak them in hot water before frying.)

Old Garlic (3 pieces of Garlic, minced, should be enough for flavour.)

Fish Sauce (I love fish sauce, but the ones that I love the best are the lighter ones from Vietnam. These fish sauces are simple and not complex and usually brings out the flavours of the vegetables. I have been using flavours a lot haven’t I? LOL)

Method

1. Wash and cut snake beans into 3-4 cm lengths. But before that, you would have to strangle them into submission first. I don’t like my stringy vegetables twisting and turning all over the place. So after releasing them from the rubber band, it is important to douse them in cold water to make sure they are all ready.

2. Ready for what?! I hear you ask. Good question. Ready for the chopping board of course. Remember to cut them into equal lengths of 3-4 cm. Okay if you do that they wouldn’t be all that equal, but I know you know what I mean.

3. Soak the Chinese Anchovies in boiling hot water to extra the flavours of the tiny little fellas. 5 minutes would be more than sufficient.

4. Minced the garlic. I am using 3 pieces as I always believe the slave shouldn’t be the master. He wouldn’t know what to do as Master with a Slave mentality, and the dish would be overpowered with garlic and that’s not what we want.

5. Heat the wok, add 2-3 tablespoons of Olive Oil. Wait till the oil is heated, add the minced garlic to fry until lightly fragrant. Add the Chinese Anchovies and continue to stir fry. I like using the tilted wok technique as it helps to brown the garlic pieces rather evenly.

6. Dump the entire bunch of cut Snake Beans into the wok and add about 4 tablespoons of the fish sauce. Add a cup of water and steam those snake beans into submission. 5 minutes at high heat with the lid covering the wok. Usually the Snake Beans will turn into a dull green colour and would stick their tongues out with two crosses for eyeballs. That’s how I like them. Mushy and nice.

Best eaten with plain porridge.

Bon Appetit!

Deep Fried Fish Head with Leeks

Deep Fried fish head with leeks

Deep Fried Fish Head with Leeks

Since discovering the KOGI tempura mix (where have I been all this time, you may wonder – I also say!!), I have decided that this is the go-to flour mix for all my deep fried dishes. Life should be simple right?! Why complicate it by following some purist video on YouTube (nothing wrong with purist videos) on the benefits of mixing your own flour mix? The reality of it is someone went to all that trouble and food technology to develop this perfect flour mix and I the snob is not using it.

Therefore I now use it.

So I decided to follow some other guy’s recipe for making Claypot Fish Head and minus all the unnecessary stuff that I didn’t want (more like I didn’t have in my fridge) and whipped up the same dish but in a different style with the same ingredients.

I deep-fried my fish head following the classic claypot fish head style – Claypot Fish Head (incidentally I also have another recipe on that cult classic). But this time I added leeks. And more importantly, this time I used the KOGI tempura mix!

The end result was needless to say perfect! (Okay lah, as perfect as perfect can be) I am only but a home cook trying to cut corners and make delicious foods with as little ingredients as possible.

Ingredients

Fish Head (any kind will do, angoli aka red snapper or garoupa aka grouper is good, I usually pay SGD 5 for one large one at my favourite fishmonger at CCWM, because I am cheapo, I usually select the bigger head, ask the uncle chop into small pieces and bag into two portions)

Leeks (wet market leeks are the best, you can choose until you bruise the entire batch and the vegetable Aunty won’t be mad at you – do this at your own peril)

KOGI tempura mix (apply this mix on the surface of the marinated fish pieces lavishly)

Light Soya Sauce (I like to use premium soya sauce, not because I am rich, but the premium soya sauce really does taste much nicer! This also goes into the marinate for the fish)

Shao Xing Hua Tiao Jiu (They sell this at NTUC and there are many different brands that have similar packaging. Again, I buy the most expensive one because it really does make my food taste better. This also goes into the marinate for the fish)

Teochew Fermented Soya Beans (aka tau jiu in Hokkien/Teochew,this is our favourite type of fermented soya beans. Not overtly salty, and consistently great tasting)

Oyster Sauce (I prefer the brand that has an image of a lady rowing a boat with a small boy, Lee Kum Kee Premium Oyster Sauce)

Olive Oil (I use olive oil to do the deep frying because I use that for cooking anyway, so it works for me. I know I should be using some light vegetable oil like canola etc – not palm oil – but I can’t be bothered really as I don’t use all that much oil anyway. Just enough to fry two pieces at a time.)

Ginger (young ginger is good, but any ginger also can. Grate it so that it forms part of the marinate for the fish pieces)

Purple Onions (instead of saying medium onions, I prefer to just call it like it is. You go to the typical wet market and it is the medium size purple looking onion. Just one will do.)

Old Garlic (there are the two basic types, Chef Garlic and Old Garlic. Use the old ones as they have more flavour. Just three pieces will do.)

Marinate

a. Use a Ziplock bag to marinate the fish head pieces. The Ziplock bag is useful because can Ziplock and seal in the marinate and allow the fish to soak up the juices.

b. Grate an inch of ginger and dump it into the bag.

c. Pour in about 3 tablespoons of light soya sauce.

d. Pour in about 3 tablespoons of Shao Xing Hua Tiao Jiu. Leave it to marinate for about an hour at least in the fridge.

Method

1. Marinate the fish head slices first. Let it stay in the fridge for about an hour.

2. Heat the olive oil in the wok and pour just enough for frying two pieces at a time using the tilt-the-wok technique. If you are using a light vegetable oil, please use that. Olive oil is healthier. Try not to use palm oil. It’s unhealthy.

3. Coat the marinated fish pieces in the KOGI tempura mix, ensuring a good coat and then frying the fish until the fish pieces are a light brown. Place them in a metal strainer with a paper towel to absorb excess oil. Do this until all fish pieces are fried.

4. In a heated wok, with three tablespoons of olive oil, stir fry the ginger until slightly fragrant, then add minced garlic, and sliced onions. Continue to stir fry. Then add two tablespoons of oyster sauce and a tablespoon of the fermented soya bean. Continue to stir fry until fragrant.

5. Add 2 bowls of water, add the sliced leeks (make sure you wash them thoroughly as these usually have sand in between their leaves.) and immediately dump all the fried fish head pieces into the wok. Cover with lid and let it cook for a good 5 minutes over a big fire.

The leeks should be softened, the fish head crispy skins should now be soggy and the water should be a thick sauce.

Serve with white rice.

Bon Appetit!

Deep Fried Prawn Fritters

Deep fried prawn fritters

Deep Fried Prawn Fritters

If there is something that I love, it would be my parents’ Prawn Fritters. I think they have achieved Michelin star status as far as I am concerned. But seriously, the prawn fritters are seriously shiok.

So what is the secret to that delightful crispy crackle? Well, it’s the texture and consistency of the batter, and the secret’s out. It is this fantastic tempura flour mix known as KOGI.

KOGI tempura flour mix

This tempura mix is the bomb. Meant for seafood and vegetables, it is already pre-mixed and all ready to go. Just mix with water to achieve the right consistency of batter, and you are all set.

Ingredients

Medium Glass/Grey Prawns (I made about 12 prawn fritters)

KOGI Tempura Flour Mix (I found it at the wet market at the Indian spice lady’s stall, cheap SGD 1.10)

Olive Oil (must be sufficient for deep frying, I use the tilt the pan/wok technique to save oil, and for optimum deep frying, the oil must be smoking hot)

Method

1. De-shell the prawns. Most people leave the tail, I did as well, you can also do likewise.

2. Prepare the batter to achieve a smooth liquid consistency. Too much batter, the prawns will stiffen, too little batter, you can’t taste the crispy crackle. Do the spoon test. Scoop and let it drip, if it flows too quickly, it is too watery. You want a slow drip. Best thing to do is to take notes and find the best consistency for you.

3. Heat the oil and make sure it is hot. Then deep fry using the tilted wok technique and fry two to three at a time. Of course if you work for the vegetable oil factory, you can fry all at once. But alas, I don’t work for the vegetable oil factory.

4. Once golden brown, take them out and let them rest on a metal strainer with a Scott’s paper towel to absorb the oil.

That’s about it. Serve with sliced tomatoes as decoration.

Bon Appetit!

Stir Fry Garlic Butter Mushrooms

Stir Fry Garlic Butter Mushrooms

You know you have done well when you begin to feel good about what you have cooked and you know the feeling is mutual. Wifey says cook this. And it is so. She can’t be wrong. After all she is my biggest critic. She criticise just about everything I do. And that’s why I love her so much.

I mean besides my Mother, no one else would bother to give me their honest opinion about anything. Okay maybe some. But they are mostly rare and few. So I have arrived at the final conclusion. She loves me. There is no other reason why.

So when she says this is good, it is good.

Ingredients

White Button Mushrooms (I bought my white button mushrooms at Market 628, 1kg SGD 14. For this dish, I am preparing for 12-15 pax, so I bought 2kg)

Garlic (I am using old garlic, about 10 pieces, finely chopped)

Thai Basil (3 stalks of Thai Basil, plucked the leaves)

Chinese Celery (5-6 stalks of local celery, not the Australian kind, these local ones are great for flavour)

Butter (real butter please! Not margarine or low fat whatever it is that you call it. I use SCS because I think it is the best butter in the world. For this recipe, 1 whole slab.)

Olive Oil (use extravagantly, mushrooms tend to soak up the oil and butter, so you would definitely need quite a lot of olive oil.)

Sea Salt (a sprinkle every 500grams I had to cook them in batches as my wok was too small to cook all 2kg at one go.)

Method:

1. Snip the stem off the white button mushrooms. Although the stem is edible, most people wouldn’t eat it for some reason. You may wish to wipe the mushrooms with a paper towel if you like. But there’s no need really.

2. Finely mince the garlic, finely chopped the local celery and pluck all the Thai basil leaves.

3. Heat a few tablespoons of olive oil and add 1/8 of the slab of butter to melt it. Once the butter starts to melt, add the mushrooms in to stir fry. At this time the mushrooms will start to soak up the oil.

4. Add the minced garlic, chopped local celery and Thai basil to fry. Sprinkle some sea salt, add another 1/8 of butter. Stir fry until fragrant and the mushrooms starts to brown a little. Repeat this process until all the mushrooms are cooked.

5. Easy only.

Bon Appetit!

Potato and Pork Ribs Soup

Potato and Pork Ribs Soup

After a pretty long hiatus from blogging, and largely due to the fact that I haven’t been cooking as much, I am somewhat starting to cook again, and this is as a request from the Wife, not because she reads my blog or anything but more because we have become more busy and thus the pertinent need to get back to cooking great tasting, simple soups for dinner.

Yes I miss cooking my home feasts too. And maybe she felt it and wanted me to kickstart the nutritious home-cooking again. Admittedly, eating out is so much more convenient. And since our fridge broke down recently, whatever stores we bought would be rotting in the defunct ice box. It didn’t help that the repair man was smoking us (and his company) by making multiple trips down to fix a seemingly simple problem. He kept testing and testing the fridge like as if it was his personal pet project. We were duped week after week into thinking that each week that he came would be the last, and that we could resume our cook-outs for dinner.

Finally, we got another repairman and the problem was solved instantly. But by that time we had already stopped cooking for a while. And I had also gotten busy and stopped going to the wet market on Saturdays. It’s as what one would say a domino effect. I did not do the marketing and therefore did not have the ingredients to cook and therefore we all ate out.

This soup came at her request. A simple no nonsense and fuss free soup. I am still quite curious as to how it would turn out. Just potatoes and pork ribs. Well, we will know soon tonight.

Ingredients:

Pork Ribs (250 grams)

Potatoes (about 3 larges ones)

1 tsp Sea Salt

Method:

  1. Parboil the ribs in hot boiling water to get rid of impurities. Pour the water away.
  2. Peel the potatoes, cut into cubes and then dump them into the pot. Add the sea salt.
  3. Boil at high heat for 15 minutes, turn off the fire and then place the pot into the thermal cooker (vacuum) and allow it to cook for the next 12 hours while you’re at work.
  4. When you’re ready to eat, boil again, and you can serve.

Bon Appetit!

Boiled Salmon with Boiled Vegetables

Boiled Salmon with Boiled Vegetables

Nothing is as easy as this healthy meal. Boiled Salmon and boiled vegetables has got to be the least imaginative meal in the world. It is like going into the white t shirt section of a clothing store searching for white t shirts.

Eating salmon in this manner helps you with your cholesterol levels it seems and it is a good way to eat clean and maybe feel good about yourself. Needless to say the boiled vegetables also provide essential vitamins. I usually have a mixture of broccoli, cauliflower and carrots.

So one might say “Alright! How do I start?”

So easy. So simple (as uncle sim would tell you). Just boil the ingredients in water until they are cooked. For the vegetables you may want to make sure they are not cooked through until mushy soft, they should have that bright shine after you blanched them.

Just drizzle some salt, black and pepper and a squish of lemon and it is ready to be serve.

Recipe 

Ingredients 

Fresh Salmon (Per portion maybe 110 grams)

Broccoli, Cauliflower and Carrots (Just enough for one portion)

Sea Salt

Black Pepper
Juice if half a Lemon

Bon Appetit!

Coconut Cream and Milk

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Coconut Cream and Milk

This may not be a surprise for those who have been using fresh Coconut Cream or Milk for their cooking, but increasingly with less wet markets and more supermarkets, coconut cream or milk is something we squeeze out of a tetra pak.

But the flavour from fresh coconut fibers can never be replaced with packet ones. If they say 100% cococnut cream on the packet, I guarantee you if you squeeze fresh Coconut Cream from the fibers of the coconut, the flavour is 200%. Once you have tried the natural, you won’t want to go back to packet ones.

Furthermore fresh coconut cream turns sour if left in the open for more than an hour. If you want to keep it longer, you would have to boil it to a simmer. And that allows you to keep it up to 4 hours.

So I am quite apprehensive about coconut cream that is package to last more than a year. Surely it is not 100%. Maybe there are preservatives?

Anyway, fresh cococnut is cheap and good. A packet costs me $2.20 (SGD), which is a lot of coconut.

To get the cream, just squeeze with your bare hands without adding any water. The expressed cream is the essence of the coconut. Very good for making Thai style curries.

And if you add coconut water or juice, to the squeezed fibers, you will yield coconut milk. If you don’t have the juice of the coconut, you may add warm water to extract a very nice coconut milk. Again that can be used for curries or making Nasi Lemak. Try it today!

Bon Appetit!

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Fresh Coconut

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Squeezing with a sieve

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Cococnut cream

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Dried coconut fibers

Drunken Sesame Chicken

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Drunken Sesame Chicken 嘛醉鸡

This is an improvement to my previous recipe Chicken in Rice Wine. That recipe is great but this is much better. I discovered that by adding more sesame oil and also hua tiao jiu together with the hakka rice wine, the results were a sweet caramelized chicken.

I like to cook this with chicken wings as they have the gelatinous fats that would be so delicious once you pressure steam and fry the chicken in a clay-pot.

Make sure you add just the right amounts of ginger and if possible fry them until they become brown and almost burnt. When the dish is done, your clay-pot might be a light charred due to the sugars in the hakka rice wine caramelising, some of the chicken parts are burnt slightly due to the heat, but that is fine. A delicious chicken dish with steamed rice or best with porridge or congee.

Recipe

Ingredients

4 Chicken Wings with Drunplets (separate the drumlets from the wings and also the wing tips)
Lots of Ginger *maybe 8-9 cm of one inch thickness* (sliced thinly)
1/4 cup of Hakka Rice Wine
1/4 cup of Shao Xing Hua Tiao Jiu
White Pepper
2 tbsp of Light Soy Sauce 
1 tbsp of Dark Soy Sauce
2 tbsp Olive Oil
4 tbsp Sesame Oil

Method

1. Marinate the chicken parts with light soy sauce and white pepper. Allow the meat to marinate at least for 5-10 minutes.

2. Sliced the ginger thinly, and then heat the olive oil and sesame oil in a clay-pot over low fire. Then fry the ginger strips until brown and crispy.

3. Add marinated chicken meat into the clay-pot for cooking. Over medium fire continue to cook until chicken pieces turn whitish in colour. Add dark soy sauce and continue cooking over medium fire. Finally add the Hakka Rice Wine and Hua Tiao Jiu and allow the chicken to simmer and cook over a slow fire. Remember to close the lid. Once cooked serve with steam rice.

Bon Appetit!!

Thai Green Curry

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Thai Green Curry

I have always wanted to learn how to make Thai Green Curry, and chanced upon a healthy cooking workshop at one of those Residents Committee places. They were demonstrating how to cook a healthier version of Thai Green Curry, and while watching them demonstrating it, I thought to myself that the healthier version actually looked quite oily in reality.

Anyway, I was there to observe, so no comments. Like I always say, if I wanted to say anything, I will only make comments on my own cooking. It looked fairly easy enough. And surprisingly, the results were really yummy when I cooked it. I used fresh Chicken Drumsticks as the meat was usually more tender and juicy. I think the meat from chicken breasts would be too dry or tough if not cooked properly, and not as yummy as the chicken drumstick meat. For my version I added a little more colour in terms of the vegetables used, yellow and red capsicum, carrots and long beans, and instead of the recommended high calcium milk, I used packet Coconut Cream (more lemak, more nice).

The key ingredient is of course the Thai Green Curry paste, I decided to get a pre-mix version from NTUC called “Dancing Chef”, and it was really nice. Of course, you can make everything from scratch if you wanted to.

Recipe

Ingredients

2 Chicken Drumsticks with Adjoined Thigh (Chopped into small pieces and marinate with Light Soya Sauce and White Pepper)
1 packet of “Dancing Chef” brand Thai Green Curry paste
3 cloves of Garlic (Chopped finely)
1 medium Yellow Onion (Chopped finely)
3 sprigs of Curry Leaves (Use only the leaves)
3 stalks of Long Beans (Chopped into 3 cm pieces)
Half of a Carrot (Chopped into bite-sized pieces)
Half of a Yellow Capsicum (Chopped into small pieces)
Half of a Red Capsicum (Chopped into small pieces)
1 small packet of Kara Coconut Cream
2 cups of Water
2 tbsp Light Soya Sauce
1/2 tsp White Pepper
Drizzle of Thai Fish Sauce (Optional)

Method

1. Chop the chicken thigh into bite size pieces and marinate with light soya sauce and white pepper for about 5-10 minutes.

2. Add 1 packet of the Thai Green Curry paste into a wok and fry at medium heat. There is no need to add additional oil as there is already oil in the packet (The paste can be quite spicy, so no need to add additional chilli). Add the chopped garlic and onions and fry together with the paste (Actually the paste is made up of these ingredients, I just added more so that it is not so spicy).

3. Add the Curry Leaves into the paste to fry, this will make the Thai Green Curry paste more fragrant (See picture below). Add the marinated chicken pieces to fry. Fry at medium heat for about 5 minutes. After that, add the chopped capsicum (both red and yellow), long beans and carrots. Continue to stir fry, this time around, turn the heat up to high.

4. Add the Kara coconut cream and add water. Give it a good stir. Do a taste test. If it is okay, then there is no need to add more flavouring. But if it is not tasty enough, then add a drizzle of Thai Fish Sauce. Cover the lid and let it boil for about 8 minutes or until it is bubbling. Do another taste test, it should be tasty and full of flavour with the coconut milk, the chicken pieces should be juicy and succulent. Then it is ready. Serve with steamed rice.

Bon Appetit!

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Olive Fried Rice

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Olive Fried Rice

Just attended a healthy cooking workshop the other day and decided to put my learning into action. I am not the most healthy cooking cook around, so don’t judge me, I am only concerned for the taste of the dish.

Anyway the recipe calls for brown rice and basmati rice mix for a healthier choice, but seriously, who has that in their warchest? Unless you already are a health conscious person, you’re unlikely to stock up on these grains. The whole reason why I would even bother cooking this dish was because my MIL gave us a whole tub of cooked rice for us to steam and eat the next day. I decided that Olive Fried Rice was the better thing to do.

It’s the quite healthy version, so maybe you would like to try it for yourself or the family, my recipe cooks for two persons. My wife and I. I used Tuna Chunks instead of boiled Chicken Breasts fillets as most people would have used that, and instead of the usual Chinese Olives, I used Kalamata Olives from Greece, a little pricey, but totally worth it for the flavour.

Recipe

Ingredients

Half a bottle of Kalamata Olives (These are your deep purple, almond shaped olives from Greece, nice flavour, NTUC got sell)
3 stalks of Long Beans (Cut into 3 cm lengths)
Half a can of Tuna (I bought the one in olive oil, any brand will do)
2 cups of Cooked Rice (The rice is usually placed in the fridge so that the rice will be more Q <– don’t ask me what is Q)
3 cloves of Garlic (Crushed)
Half a Yellow Onion (Chopped finely)
Drizzle of Thai Fish Sauce
Handful of Cashew Nuts
Olive Oil

Method

1. Heat olive oil in non-stick wok/pan and stir fry the garlic and chopped onions until fragrant. Medium heat will do. Stir fry the cashew nuts together with the ingredients until slightly brown.

2. Mash half of the olives and rough chop the rest of the olives. Throw the olives in the wok and continue frying. Add the tuna chunks and continue to fry. If the oil not enough, add more oil (I know this is the part where it becomes less healthy, but if not enough oil, you need to add).

3. Add the chopped long beans into the wok to fry. Fry until the long beans are soften. Now add the cooked rice to fry together. Drizzle Thai Fish Sauce over the rice and fry until the fried rice is fragrant.

Bon Appetit!

Sambal Belacan Tua Tau

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Sambal Belacan Tua Tau

Since today is polling day and all the tua tau are walking here and there anxiously at the various places, I thought it would be befitting to cook a very delicious Sambal Belacan Tua Tau to celebrate this milestone moment.

I bought 1 kg of tua tau from the guy that had the most fish left, just to help him out. Of course I know at this time, his tua tau sure cannot make it one. But I wanted to help him. So I bought as much as I could.

And while washing the tua tau, surely as the sun sets in the evening, there was an awful stench of rotting flesh. Okay, you know I am joking right?!

They weren’t the freshest tua tau but after frying it with Sambal Belacan, they were all united in flavour. Delicious.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 kg of Tua Tau (clams, not sure what it is called on English)
6-7 cloves of Garlic (crushed)
4 tbsp Sambal Belacan (you can add more if you like)
Olive Oil

Method

1. Wash and rinse the clams/mussels or whatever you want to call it. Make sure they are rinsed thoroughly as they are very dirty. I usually wash and rinse until the water is clear.

2. Heat some oil in a wok/pan. Fry the crushed garlic cloves until fragrant. Then add the washed clams/mussels into the wok to cook. Scoop the sambal belacan onto the top of the clams/mussels. Cover the lid and turn up the heat.

3. Steam until all the clams/mussels open up from their sleep and stir the clams/mussels until the sauce is well mixed. Serve with plain porridge.

Bon Appetit!

Stir Fry Xiao Bai Cai with Fried Tau Kee

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Stir Fry Xiao Bai Cai with Fried Tau Kee

My wife got this Xiao Bai Cai from the local vegetable seller and almost sworn by the product. I thought it was funny that she should be feeling this way about vegetable, I mean I usually don’t gush about my groceries. But I guess it was not without good reason. The Xiao Bai Cai that we usually get at the supermarket are usually quite sandy and would require a lot of soaking and washing.

For some reason the supplier didn’t want to disturb the plant so much after it was harvested, and so it was not washed or treated with anything (actually I am not sure if it was treated with anything or not). I always thought vegetables should be packed the same way after they are being harvested. But that said, there are different suppliers and also different ways to grow vegetables these days.

Maybe this Xiao Bai Cai was grown hydroponically at some local farm nearby my house? Anyway, we were both quite pleased with the vegetables as it meant less washing and scrubbing in between the stems and that we could quickly give it a good rinse and cut it up for frying.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 packet of Xiao Bai Cai
2 pieces of Fried Tau Kee (these usually comes with fish paste in between the layers)
3-4 cloves of Garlic (crushed not minced)
3-4 tbsp Olive Oil
2 tbsp Thai Fish Sauce

Method

1. Wash and rinse Xiao Bai Cai thoroughly, making sure there is no sand or debris in between the stems. (Good habit to wash vegetables even though you know they were grown hydroponically. There could be worms or whatever creepy crawlies sometimes, so better to be safe.)

2. Chop them up into bite size pieces. This allows for easy cooking, and also easier to eat. (Of course, you would know that already.) Also, shred the Fried Tau Kee into thin strips.

3. Heat 3-4 tbsp of Olive Oil in the wok/pan. Make sure the oil is hot by turning up the heat to high. Fry the garlic pieces, giving them a quick stir to prevent the garlic from burning. Do this until the garlic pieces are fragrant and start to brown. Then add in the shredded Fried Tau Kee pieces. Fry until you smell the tau kee pieces (sorry don’t know how else better to explain this part). After that, reserve the garlic and fried tau kee pieces in a plate while you cook the vegetables.

4. You generally would want more oil so that the vegetables will cook better and not burn. So if need be, add more oil. (I say more oil because I like to fry my vegetables using high heat, and oil helps to prevent the vegetables from burning. I find that the vegetables cooks evenly that way, so that works for me. I know it is unhealthy to use so much oil.) 

5. Next with the remainder oil in the work, fry the stems first as these tend to take a while to cook, and once they are cooked, then add the rest of the vegetables in to continue to fry. Remember to do the pan flip method. Quickly drizzle the Thai Fish Sauce over the vegetables and continue to pan flip the vegetables. The searing sound of the vegetables burning along the sides of the pan would ensure that it is cooked evenly. (At least that’s how I would cook it. Sometimes stirring it with the wooden spatula doesn’t mix the vegetables or the sauce that well.)

6. After that, put the reserved ingredients (garlic and fried tau kee) and continue to do the pan flip method. Once you have mixed the ingredients well, cover the vegetables with the lid and allow it to steam for a few minutes. This would soften the vegetables and allow the fish sauce to mix in well. That’s it.

Bon Appetit!

Stir Fry Bitter Gourd with 妖肉 in Salted Black Beans

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Stir Fry Bitter Gourd with 妖肉 in Salted Black Beans

I am throwing down the gauntlet for this recipe, it super heightens umami in an amazing manner that I can’t even begin to describe it. Like they say, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting.

This twist to an old recipe that my mum always made looks likely to stay in my arsenal of recipes. Instead of the usual beef stir fry slices, I am using “yeow” meat or in Mandarin 妖肉 as I so fondly refer to that prized cut of pork.

Sliced thinly and simply marinated with light soya sauce and white pepper yields a flavour that is out of this world. Perfect, at least it is in my culinary journey so far.

The bitter gourd fried using the pan flip method and hot oil, flung up and down to a sweetened tenderness that is just fabulous. The key is to cook the ingredients separately and then bringing them together later on to cook together.

Recipe

Ingredients

A whole Bitter Gourd (sliced thinly or about half a centimetre thick)
2-3 tsp of Salted Black Beans
4-5 cloves of Garlic (bruised)
50 grams of “Yeow” 妖肉 (in hokkien it is called “yo lai ba”)
Light Soya Sauce
Thai Fish Sauce
White Pepper
Olive Oil

Method

1. Slice the pork into thin slices and then marinate in light soya sauce about 2 tsp. Add some white pepper. Leave the pork slices to marinate for about 5 minutes.

2. Bruise or crush the garlic, no need to mince. Then heat 3-4 table spoons of oil in the wok and stir fry the garlic pieces. Fry until the sides are slightly brown. Then add the black beans in to stir fry. Then add the marinated pork.

3. Stir Fry the pork until it starts to change colours and the water content starts to form what looks like the sauce.

4. Reserve the pork slices aside once the meat texture start to change colours.

5. In the same pan, wash and heat another 3-4 tbsp of oil. This time around, you are frying the bitter gourd using the pan flip method. Fry until the bitter gourd is softened and tender (not mushy). Add a drizzle of Thai dish sauce to the bitter gourd pieces and continue to stir fry. The key I believe is the separate frying of the bitter gourd and the addition of fish sauce.

6. Once the bitter gourd is softened, add the reserved (from just now) meat and combine the ingredients. Keep frying and ensure that the ingredients are cooked and that there is now a confluence of flavours.

7. Serve with steamed rice.

Bon Appetit!

OTS: How to Slaughter a Durian Champedak

OTS: How to Slaughter a Durian Champedak

My friend was telling me to do more How-To videos to accompany my recipes. It would definitely help my readers understand what I am writing sometimes. I am not very good at these things, so I told him that I will only do One Take Sessions (after seeing someone else on YouTube doing it). So here’s my very few OTS(s) that I did last time, and maybe I might do more of these How-To OTS.

So this is my classic OTS: How to Slaughter a Durian Champedak. If you haven’t had the chance to eat the Champedak, then you are really missing out or living in some isolated part of Singapore where they don’t sell fruits. If you’re not from Singapore, then take a holiday and come visit us. And while you’re here, please have some Durian Champedak. The heavenly flavour is unforgettable.

The only problem with buying a Durian Champedak, is the trouble of having to open it yourself. It is a very sticky fruit, and the sap of the fruit will cause your fingers to be really uncomfy. You therefore really need to have rubber gloves, and to open the fruit, you need to oil the knife that you’re using. Only then it will be easier for you to wash the knife.

It’s called Durian Champedak is because of the pungent flavour and the fact that it has a strong smell. If the fruit is very ripe, it does resemble the smell of a durian. Have fun, enjoy the fruit.

Bon Appetit!

 

 

 

Sambal Kembong

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Sambal Kembong

I love Kembong Fish, and if there was a choice between Selar and Kembong, I would choose the latter. The flesh of the Kembong fish is sweet and delicious, much nicer than the Selar. Try it.

I love having the fish fried with a little oil and making diagonal cuts along the slides of the fish to fill its guts with freshly chopped red chillis that have been mixed with a sprinkle of sea salt.

I like it fried until it is crispy and crunchy when you bite into it and with a squish of lime – it is perfect. The confluence of salty, sour and spicy flavours mixed together just makes you want to munch the crispy fish head. The perfect dish to accompany any meal, especially porridge.

Recipe

Ingredients

Kembong Fish (a few will do actually, usually I am only cooking for me and my wife)
Red Chilli 2 pcs (chopped with a sprinkle of sea salt)
Sea Salt (just a sprinkle will do)
Calamansi Lime 2 Whole

Method

1. Wash the fish and remove the guts if you haven’t already. If you are not eating the fish on the same day, it is better to keep the guts of the fish in when buying the fish. This helps to keep it fresh longer.

2. Score the sides of the fish deep enough to create pockets to fill the sambal (aka chilli) paste.

3. Chop the red chillis until a fine paste. This paste I also call sambal. It’s a Malay word that means chilli? Sprinkle a little sea salt and give it a good mix with the spoon.

4. Fill the fish with the sambal paste and the fry it under medium heat in a frying pan. Make sure there is sufficient oil so that it can be crispy and crunchy when you bite it.

5. I usually use Olive oil or soya bean oil. The last thing you should be using is any vegetable oil that lists palm oil as its main ingredients. Palm oil is not healthy for you. So Olive or soya bean is best.

6. Serving suggestion: you may add a little bit of coriander leaves for colour, a drizzle of dark soya sauce if you want more flavour and a slight sweetness. Otherwise it is good just as it is.

Bon Appetit!

Stir Fry Chye Sim with Fried Tau Kee

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Stir Fry Chye Sim with Fried Tau Kee

I was at NTUC the other day (as usual) and I saw this BoBo product (it is really called BoBo, I’m not kidding!) called Fried Tau Kee and instantly I remembered eating something similar at some Yong Tau Foo stall. So I bought it. I knew it would taste fabulous with some fried vegetable like Chye Sim (local) or China Chye Sim (above picture).

The fundamental differences between local Chye Sim and China Chye Sim is that the foreign one (actually they are both foreign) is shorter and have thicker stems. They resemble Kai Lan vegetable in some ways.

I already cooked it with the local Chye Sim and my wife loves it. So now to try it with the China variant of the Chye Sim. I have a feeling that it should taste just as delicious, and I was right. My wife loves it, and that’s all that matters really.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 packet of China Chye Sim (I got the NTUC ones and they are usually very nicely packed)
1 packet of BoBo Fried Tau Kee (this usually comes filled with fish paste)
3-4 cloves of Garlic (rough chop)
Olive Oil
Light Soya Sauce

Method

1. Heat 3 tbsp oil in wok/pan and when the oil is sufficiently heated, drop the garlic in and stir fry until fragrant.

2. Slice the Fried Tau Kee into thin strips and then add into the wok/pan to fry with the garlic. Do this until the Tau Kee pieces start to brown a little.

3. Chop the Chye Sim into bite size pieces and give them a good wash and rinse. Then add into the wok/pan to stir fry. I have a different method of stir frying for my vegetables. I prefer to flip the vegetables instead of attacking them with the wooden spatula. I find that this way of frying vegetables was much better (and more fun). The most important consideration is the fire, it should be high and the flipping action must be continuous.

Bon Appetit!

Stir Fry Chicken with Scallops, Celery and Cashews

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Stir Fry Chicken with Scallops, Celery and Cashews

It’s a mouthful I must admit, but there is just no two ways of naming this amazing dish. The Stir Fry Chicken with Japanese Scallops, Australian Celery and American Cashews is just as multinational as the number of ingredients in it.

Of course the chicken is 100% local. Or at least I think it is. Or maybe it is Malaysian. *shrugged*

One thing is for certain. I cooked it in a very Singaporean kitchen. 100% home cooked. Okay so what you may say. And you are right. No big deal.

The only thing to shout about is really how well these ingredients all come together to make a delicious dish accompaniment to a perfect meal. The roasted cashews, seared to an uneven edgy char. The marinated chicken bits and pieces seasoned with the troika of marinates – white pepper, soya sauce and oyster sauce – three basic differences that brings such confluence of taste to simple poultry.

I love the roasted cashews and how the celery just added that unique flavour to the dish. Truly I was amazed that I realised to cook this dish only now. This is the stuff legends are made of.

Recipe

Ingredients

2 Chicken Drum (deboned)
Handful of Baked Cashews
3 stalks of Celery (chopped)
6 pieces of Scallops (halved)
White Pepper
Oyster Sauce
Light Soya Sauce
Olive Oil

Method

1. Marinate the chicken pieces in white pepper (about 1 tsp), 1 tbsp soya sauce and 1 tbsp oyster sauce. Leave it to marinate for about 5 minutes.

2. In a wok/pan heat about 3 tbsp oil. Then stir fry the cashews until they start to brown. Once the cashews are browning, add the marinated chicken pieces to stir fry. Ensuring that they change colour to a light brown.

3. Add the scallops and turn the heat up to high. Keep stirring to ensure evenness of cooking. Then throw in the chopped celery and cover the lid to steam the vegetables and softened them.

4. Steaming cooks the vegetables and the meats and allows the flavours to come together cohesively. Remove the lid and stir fry until you can smell the dish. Do a taste test and you can serve.

Bon Appetit!

Pigtail Black Bean Soup

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Pigtail Black Bean Soup

The ubiquitous Pigtail Black Bean Soup. This soup is as Chinese as any soup could be. Every time I think of this soup, I am reminded of Brad Pitt. The names of the ingredients have elements of his name which seemed quite unfortunate really.

Don’t get me wrong, I love his portrayal of characters in his movies. Just that with his name as iconic as that, it seem to rhyme with the name of the soup.

Anyway, I heard this soup makes your black hair blacker and shiny. Not sure if it is true or not. I guess it doesn’t really matter as long as it is a good bowl of soup with delicious pigtails.

I bought 4 pigtails for this soup, so the flavour sure to be power. Plus I added a piece of dried cuttlefish to boost the flavour as well, so no excuse for it to not taste great. A very easy recipe especially with the thermal cooker.

Recipe

Ingredients

4 Pigtails (chopped)
1 bowl of Black Beans (pre-soaked overnight)
10 Wolfberries
5 large Red Dates
Half piece of Dried Cuttlefish
1 tsp Sea Salt

Method

1. Boil a kettle of water. Place the pigtail (frozen) into the pot. Dump in the pre-soaked black beans. Add the wolfberries, red dates and cuttlefish. Finish off with a tsp of salt.

2. Once water is boiled, add into the pot. Turn fire to high and boil for at least 20 minutes. Then place the pot into the thermal cooker to simmer for at least 12 hours. Re-boil it tonight. The soup sure nice one.

Bon Appetit!

Stir Fry Chicken

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Stir Fry Chicken

After a brief hiatus from cooking, actually it has been more like writing recipes. I have been cooking just not posting my new dishes. I wanted to try some classic favourites to see if they will turn out just as fabulous as the ones that I find at the restaurants.

For example, I recently tried the three egg spinach, which incidentally is my family’s favourite dish that we would always order when we go PuTien Chinese Restaurant. I tried it the other day and it turned out to be quite alright, just that the century egg I used was the soft centre types which resulted in the soup being quite a murky green.

Anyway, I have been cooking a lot of chicken in rice wine lately and as much as I liked the dish, it was a little too frequent. So today I decided that I would cook it the way I cook frog legs, in sliced ginger and lots of spring onions. Simple and delicious.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 Chicken Drum (deboned)
4 stalks of Spring Onions
5 thin slices of Ginger
2 tbsp Oyster Sauce
1 tbsp Light Soya Sauce
Drizzle of Sesame Seed Oil
Sprinkle of White Pepper

Method

1. Debone the chicken drum (usually I get the chicken butcher to do it for me). Then cut the meat into small bite sized pieces. Marinate with light soya sauce, oyster sauce and white pepper with a light drizzle of sesame seed oil.

2. Mix with your fingers until meat is coated and leave it for about 5 minutes to marinate.

3. Wash and cut the spring onions into 6 cm lengths and split into two portions. Then slice 5 thin slices of ginger.

4. Heat oil in the pan/wok and fry the ginger and first portion of spring onions until fragrant. Then add the lightly marinated chicken meat to stir fry. Keep doing this until the meat is cooked. To test if the meat is cooked – taste it.

5. Add the remaining spring oinions midway of frying the chicken so that the greens will still be green and not all softened. Once cooked serve with steam rice or white porridge. Easy.

Bon Appetit!

Halibut Fillet with Asian Salmon Sauce

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Halibut Fillet with Asian Salmon Sauce

This is a recipe that I picked up on Asian Food Channel and I thought it was a fantastic idea to present it this way. The halibut fillet was topped with an Asian Salmon Sauce which I thought looked really delightful and tasty.

Ingredients like lemon grass, shredded kaffir lime leaves sautéed with shallots and garlic, and then blended with Thai sweet chilli sauce really adds flavours to the salmon to form a pate. Yes, we are blending the salmon fish together to make the fish paste, kind of like making an otah otah and then layering it on top of another fish.

If you can’t find halibut at your local Asian supermarket you can substitute it with the Basa Bocourti Fish. If you don’t have either, any dory fillet also can.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 piece Halibut Fillet (alternatively you could also use the Basa Bocourti Fish, a Mekong River Catfish)
1 piece Salmon Fillet (cut into pieces to be blended)
2 stalks Lemon Grass
3 pieces of Kaffir Lime Leaves
2 bulbs of Shallots (small red onions also can)
3 cloves of Garlic (crushed)
3 tbsp Thai Sweet Chilli Sauce
100 ml Heavy Cream (aka cooking cream)
Olive Oil
Sea Salt
Lemon wedge (a squish just before serving, optional)

Method

1. Chop the shallots. Crush the garlic. Then sauté in the pan with 2 tbsp of olive oil. Add a little salt to prevent the ingredients from burning. Salt helps to extract moisture from the ingredients.

2. Shred the lower ends of the lemon grass (about 1/3) and you may discard the rest. The flavour is strongest near the bottom. Shred the kaffir lime leaves and add the ingredients into the pan and continue frying.

3. After the flavours of the ingredients are blended, reserve aside. Chop the salmon into pieces. Place in blender/food processor. Add Thai sweet chilli sauce. Add heavy cream. Then add the sautéed ingredients and blend till well mixed. Adjust the textures accordingly with the heavy cream, if you need more liquid depending on the size of your salmon fillet. It should be an orangy hue like otah otah.

4. Season the halibut fillet with salt and black pepper. Spread the salmon pate on the top of the halibut fillet and then cut them up into squares. Arrange the squares on a baking tray and bake them at 180 degrees for about 6 minutes. Serve with a squish of lemon if you like.

Bon Appetit!

Sambal Belacan Okra with Tomatoes

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Sambal Belacan Okra with Tomatoes

Here is another dish that goes very well with Sambal Belacan sauce. Okra aka Lady’s Fingers – don’t ask me why they are called that when they don’t look remotely like any lady’s finger – blends very well in the sambal belacan sauce.

I can only say try it if you haven’t already stir fry it. I cooked it with large beef tomatoes and powdered hae bi aka dried shrimp. The dried shrimps were grounded to almost like a fine powder using a food processor or you can work out some arm muscles with the traditional pestle and mortar.

Whichever method you choose the 32nd result will be a fine powdered form of Dried shrimp. You should have a 2 tbsp worth. The fragrance of the dried shrimp plus the sambal belacan simply enhances the flavour of this seemingly simple dish.

Recipe

Ingredients

15 pieces of Okra (the way to select the good ones is to flick the end of the okra to see if it is too hard or too soft. If it flicks back, then likely that it is good.)
30 grams of hae bi aka Dried Shrimp
1 large tbsp of Sambal Belacan
2 large Beef Tomatoes (quartered)
3 cloves of Garlic (crushed)
Olive Oil

Method

1. Heat oil till it is smoking. Fry the crushed garlic (not minced) and fry till fragrant. Then add in the dried ground hae bi aka dried shrimp. Fry until fragrant. This one really smells good.

2. Then add the tomatoes in to fry. Stir Fry until the tomatoes start to soften and break down. Then add the okra (which you would have already sliced diagonally) and continue to fry.

3. Now add the sambal belacan and continue to stir fry. Don’t be tempted to add in additional water. The liquid from the tomatoes should be sufficient and you generally want to allow the ingredients to cook in their juices.

4. Continue to fry until the gooey-ness of the okra starts to manifest. Make sure the vegetable is coated nicely with the chilli paste. Serve with steamed rice.

Bon Appetit!

Sambal Belacan Petai with Prawns

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Sambal Belacan Petai with Prawns

I decided to cook Sambal Belacan Petai with Prawns tonight. The stinky beans Petai is one of those lesser cooked at home and not generally appreciated, but with sambal belacan, it is magically transformed into a delicacy.

The wet market vegetable uncle had a huge supply of Petai that weekend and I had to grab a pack and plan it into my weekly gastronomic journey through the kitchen. One of the things that I enjoy doing these days is quick cooking. That is to come back and quickly whip up dinner dishes for the family in under 30 minutes. It’s a challenge to do it, but I totally look forward to doing it everyday.

So this simple recipe cooked with pre-made sambal belacan will definitely rock your socks off. The key is the cooking time and a non stick pan/wok. Otherwise it is very easy to cook Petai.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 bag of Petai (stinky beans usually available at the wet market)
1 large tbsp of Sambal Belacan (I got those pre-made ones at the supermarket)
1 large Yellow Onion (quartered)
6 large Glass Prawns (I realised that this type of prawns are perfect for the dish, they are expensive, but no regrets)
2 cloves of Garlic (minced)
2 tbsp Olive Oil

Method

1. Some preparation needs to be done with the Petai beans. You need to split the beans into halves and wash them thoroughly. We split the beans because sometimes there are worms burrows and those need to be discarded.

2. In a non-stick wok, add olive oil and stir fry the onions. You would want a non-stick wok or pan because you would be frying the ingredients over high heat for a while and you generally don’t want the ingredients to char and burn.

3. After frying the onions until they are softened and fragrant, add the Petai to stir fry. You then continue to stir fry until some of the onions begin to brown slightly. These visual milestones are important because cooking equipment and timing may differ.

4. Add the minced garlic and fry till you can smell the fragrance of the garlic. Then add a generous table spoon of Sambal Belacan and continue to stir fry, making sure that the ingredients are coated with the sambal sauce.

5. Once you can smell the fragrance of the chilli paste. Add in the prawns to cook. For this dish, you would want to cook the prawns until they turn into an “O” shape. Although I often say “O” means overcooked, it is permissible for this dish as the direct heat is shared with other ingredients.

6. Once sufficiently cooked, taste that the Petai beans are soft and yummy. Serve with steamed rice.

Bon Appetit!

Braised Chicken Feet Noodles

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Braised Chicken Feet Noodles

This is our all time favourite. Braised Chicken Feet noodles aka 鸡脚面. I kind of got tired of the long queues at our favourite chicken feet noodle stall nearby our place. The queue has been unusually ridiculous. I waited for 45 minutes the other day. Terrible.

So I decided to make my own braised chicken feet noodles ala ho sim lang style. My challenge was to make it such that the chicken feet still retains the gelatinous strains and the chewiness of the meat but yet tender and full of flavour.

I don’t quite like the ones at the Chicken Feet noodle shop because they usually deep fry the chicken feet first before braising. That method kind of makes the feet puffy and wrinkly. I prefer them cooked my way.

Truth be told it was quite a tedious process, but totally worth it. The preparation for the chicken feet took almost a whole day to prepare. The noodles was the easy part.

Recipe

Ingredients

10 pieces of Chicken Feet (usually the wet market uncle would already pack them in packs of 10, very convenient)
5 pieces of Dried Shitake Mushrooms
3 thin slices of Ginger
3 cloves of Garlic
3 stalks of Spring Onions
1 piece of Star Anise
2 tbsp of Oyster Sauce
1 tbsp of Light Soya Sauce
2 tbsp of Dark Soya Sauce
1/4 cup of Shao Xing Hua Tiao Jiu
Sprinkle of White Pepper
1 tsp of Castor Sugar
Tomato Ketchup
Shin Ramen Noodles (Korean instant noodles)
Olive Oil
Water reserved from the soaking of mushrooms

Method

1. Soak the shitake mushrooms in half a bowl of hot water. After they are soaked, slice the mushrooms into halves. Reserve the water for later.

2. In a pot, boil the chicken feet until the water becomes oily. Reserve the stock for frying vegetables (eg. Mani Cai with Egg). Reserve the chicken feet for later.

3. In a claypot, add 2 tbsp of Olive oil, turn heat to medium, add ginger slices, crushed garlic (not minced), spring onions halves (about 4 cm lengths) and star anise. Saute until fragrant. Fragrant here means all the smells of the ingredients become one. Remember to leave some finely chopped spring onions for garnishing.

4. Next add the soaked mushroom halves and stir fry with the rest of the ingredients for a while before adding the chicken feet into the pot to stir fry as well. Do this for a few minutes. Add sugar and white pepper. Continue to mix.

5. While the ingredients are frying, prepare the seasoning mix of sauces in a small bowl. Once ready, pour the seasoning sauce into the pot and give it a good stir. Add the reserved mushroom water into the pot until all the chicken feet are covered.

6. Bring to a boil and then turn the heat down to a simmer with lid on. Continue to cook for at least an hour. After that turn the heat off and leave it in the pot to soak up the marinate. Boil with lid on again and leave it to marinate overnight.

7. After more than 12 hours in the pot, the longer the better and in my case, almost 24 hours later, I turned up the heat for one last time before assembling my braised chicken feet noodles for breakfast.

8. In a separate pot, cook the Korean instant noodles. You can use whatever noodles you want. I like the Korean noodles because they are quite filling and easy to cook. Once cooked, plate it. Add a little dollup of ketchup and mix with sauce from the braised chicken feet.

9. Give the noodles a good mix, assemble the chicken feet and mushrooms and a generous sprinkle of chopped spring onions. Serve hot.

Bon Appetit!

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Boil chicken feet until stock is oily.

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Soak shitake mushrooms in hot water

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Saute dry ingredients until fragrant

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Cooked chicken feet

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Chopped spring onions

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Braised Chicken Feet noodles

Stir Fry Mani Cai with Egg

Stir Fry Mani Cai with Egg

My mother in law likes to cook this vegetable for weekend dinners with the family and it seems the entire family loves it. My wife swears by it and cited many childhood memories of eating it when she was still in primary school.

Of course I have never eaten this Mani Cai until I started dating my wife. Pardon my skepticism. If it was so fantastic, it would be very popular wouldn’t it? It seems it is only available at the wet market vegetable seller and no where else. Plus the way to say it properly is always a point of contention. So not many people know what it really is. Some call it Ma Lee while others call is Ba Lee.

So just what is this vegetable that everyone seems to be raving about? Everyone here refers to my wife’s family. Not much is known about it except that it came from the vegetable seller at the market. So the only way was to do some research online and while doing so, I discovered that while it is nutritious and nice, it was also deadly if consumed uncooked. Wah lau so dangerous.

If you think I am joking, please Read this. It seems the uncooked version can cause respiratory problems, leading to lung failure. Wah, sound so serious. So better to cook it and make sure it is cooked well.

Maybe you are now having second thoughts about cooking this dish. I would too if I knew it would be a life and death situation.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 packet of Mani Cai (aka sayur manis or 马尼菜)
10 cloves of Garlic
2 ladle of Chicken Stocksofteniled the chicken stock from chicken feet)
3 whole Eggs
2 tbsp Olive Oil
2 tbsp Light Soya Sauce

Method

1. Wash the sayur manis (lit. Sweet Leaves) before plucking the leaves and discarding the stems.

2. After that crush the leaves with your bare hands (and laugh like a tyrant while doing it). Then with the side of a cleaver smash the garlic and then stir fry them in a heated pan/wok in Olive oil. Fry till fragrant. After that add the mani cai into the wok and stir fry with the garlic.

3. The vegetable will almost immediately reduce in volume. Continue to fry till it is a hue of dark green. Add a ladle of Chicken stock and continue frying. Then add the eggs (already beaten together with the light soya sauce) and continue to stir fry.

4. Close the lid and continue cooking in medium heat. After the eggs are cooked, give it a good mix and continue to stir fry. If the vegetable is too dry, add more chicken stock. Continue cooking until vegetable is softened. Serve hot  with steamed rice.

If you like Nai Bai Vegetable, you might want to check out this simple recipe as well.
1. Stir Fry Nai Bai

Bon Appetit!

Egg Mayo Sandwich

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Egg Mayo Sandwich

My wife has been taking up more cooking roles recently but only because I haven’t had time to cook or was caught up in traffic on the way home. So she would quickly prepare the ingredients for me to cook when I do get back.

I think she needs more confidence in the kitchen to eventually cook everyday. Never mind that takes time. Interestingly though, her dishes are not too bad. Maybe I might sneakily outsource some of the cooking to her just for starters.

So this morning I couldn’t get out of bed in time to make breakfast and she quietly and dutifully made a simple Egg Mayo sandwich for us. So nice of her. It was again very subtly flavoured but most importantly, it was delicious.

I had to ask her for the recipe.

Recipe

Ingredients

2 whole Eggs, hard boiled
2 tbsp Japanese Mayo (the baby brand)
White Pepper (just a dash)
Salt (just a sprinkle)
10 grams Unsalted Butter

Method

1. Boil the eggs in a pot of water at high heat till they are hard boiled. Should be about 15 minutes.

2. After peeling the eggs (over running water), mash them with a fork and mix with the butter and mayo. The texture should be moist and like a paste. Sprinkle salt and white pepper and continue to mix and combine.

3. Spread the egg mayo paste on the bread slices and it is done. Should have enough to make two egg mayo sandwiches.

Bon Appetit!

Bak Chor Mee

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Bak Chor Mee

I love Bak Chor Mee so naturally when I find one that I like a lot. I will keep quiet about it simply because I really like to eat it without having to queue for it. I can’t tahan having to queue for food. Especially when it is my favourite food place.

But that said, there are times when the Bak Chor Mee is so good that I have to share it. This is one of those places. I can’t really remember if I have done a review of this simple stall at Block 524 Hougang Ave 6, but it is a true gem of a noodle stall. The Bak Chor Mee is delicious and interestingly there is something in the mix of the noodles that makes you want to have some more.

I ordered a small bowl with extra fish ball for $3.50, which is a steal if you think about it. Some food courts are already selling a standard portion of Bak Chor Mee for about $3.50 or even $4.00. The Jing Ying Coffee Shop is really old school with some really awesome foods, but this stall is my favourite. Here’s a link to the location, just in case you want to pay them a visit.

Bon Appetit!

Stir Fry Nai Bai

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Stir Fry Nai Bai

My mother-in-law gave us a packet of what seems to be the nicest looking Nai Gai vegetable I have ever seen in a long time. It was actually milky white in colour or literally in Mandarin it was Nai Bai.

So we decided to keep dinner simple and do a simpler Stir Fry Nai Bai with garlic slices and a tomato just for that additional sour taste. A little oyster sauce and the meal is complete.

The other Nai Bai that I have been seeing around the supermarket are usually quite dirty looking. There is very little “bai” (aka white) in those packages of Nai Bai vegetable.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 packet of Nai Bai vegetable
3 cloves of Garlic
1 medium Tomato
1 tbsp Oyster Sauce
1 tsp Light Soya Sauce
3-4 dried Chinese Scallops
2 tbsp Olive Oil

Method

1. Wash the vegetable thoroughly and remove any grain of sand or dirt. Place on colander and dry.

2. In a wok, heat the oil. Then fry the crushed garlic pieces. You can crush them using the side of the cleaver. Just simply slap them really hard. I like cooking garlic this way so that I can taste the flavour better.

3. Add the sliced tomato pieces in to cook as well. By now there should be some liquid in the pan. Add the dried scallops (no need to soak). Continue to stir fry until tomato start to soften.

4. Add the nai bai vegetables, already trimmed and stems and leafy greens nicely chopped and separated. Personally I prefer cooking them whole. Looks more appealing to me. But you should chop it so that it is easier to eat.

5. Add oyster sauce and light soya sauce in a small bowl of water and give it a good mix. Then pour the sauce into the wok. Now turn the heat up high and cover the wok with the lid. Let it cook or steam for about 4 minutes.

6. When you lift the lid, the vegetables should have shrunk and this is typical as the vegetable loses its water content. In return that water is now your very lovely sauce. Serve hot with steamed rice.

Bon Appetit!

How to Poach an Egg

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How to Poach an Egg

I am sure every home cook would have come to this moment in their journey of self discovery as well as quest to cook every recipe there is in the world.

I have always wanted to Poach an egg the Julia Child way but I also realised that patience is a virtue that I lack when it comes to cooking. Mainly due to the fact that I don’t cook for pleasure but it is more like a functional need. So when the recipe calls for a poached egg, I got to do it the ho sim lang way with a lifehack.

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So what I did was to crack a raw egg into a bowl with cling wrap placed on top. Then I would hold up the ends of the cling wrap and form a tiny package (photo right at the top of post).

Then using a makeshift sous vide device which is none other than a pot with boiling hot water (fire turn off) – I created a water bath for the tiny packages. Place them into the pot and allow the eggs to cook slowly. Turning on a heat would make the eggs cook faster than desired. So this is the best way.

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So it sits there in the makeshift Jacuzzi until the time is right. I like this method of cooking because you can choose the level of doneness for the eggs. I like my eggs soft boiled so I took mine out rather quickly.

But if you prefer a nicely poached egg like those at the restaurants, then perhaps you might want to leave it there till the egg becomes a congealed parcel of goodness, with it golden butter encased and protected until the time for it to be revealed.

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I placed mine on the Ragu Pasta I cooked yesterday night and interestingly it is like the beautiful sunset with the white resembling a drifting cloud.

Bon Appetit!

Ragu Pasta with Poached Egg

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Ragu Pasta with Poached Egg

I love Italian cooking and always love trying new recipes and different styles of cooking traditional dishes. This is an improvised Ragu Pasta recipe from my friend and mentor Joe Kwan and his lovely wife Winkie.

They cooked this delicious Ragu Pasta for our social last weekend and it was such a subtle dish that I too wanted to recreate it for our dinner tonight. Truly it was wholesome Italian cooking, peppered with lots of unmerited flavour.

It’s fairly easy to cook although the poached egg part requires a little skill. Typically to poach an egg, you have to add a little vinegar into a pot of boiling water and stir the water so that the egg retains its shape and slowly cooks. But because I needed to quickly cook and make sure that dinner was served on time, I took some short cuts. Read on to find out how it is done, the ho sim lang way.

Recipe

Ingredients

250 grams Minced Beef
125 grams Parmigiano Reggiano Cheese
1 box of Barilla Friget Penne
1 can of Anchovies
Handful of Pine Nuts
2 stalks Sweet Basil Leaves
2 stalks Flat Leaf Parsley (aka Italian parsley)
1 large Yellow Onion (I was supposed to be using a French Shallot and a Red Onion)
1 piece Bay Leaf
1 bottle of Barilla Bolognese Sauce
1 bowl of Sweet Cherry Tomatoes
1 cup of Cabnernet Sauvignon red wine
3 tbsp Olive Oil (and some for cooking the pasta)
Black Pepper
Sea Salt

Method

1. Boil a kettle of water. Pour the box of penne dried pasta into the pot. Add a little salt and olive oil. Add the kettle of boiling water and cook the pasta for 11 minutes to al dente or longer if you like.

2. While the pasta is cooking, add salt and pepper to the minced beef and give it a good mix. In a small frying pan, roast the pine nuts until they are brown. After the pasta is cooked, scoop the pasta and dry them out in a colander but reserve the water in a bowl.

3. Wash the pot and then add olive oil. After you have marinated the beef for about 10 minutes, fry the beef in the pot over low fire. While that is cooking, cut and chop the onion. Slice the cherry tomatoes and tear up the parsley leaves and basil leaves.

4. Add the prepared ingredients including the roasted pine nuts, into the pot and stir fry, turning up the heat a little. Add the can of anchovies along with the olive oil in the can into the pot. Continue to stir fry until the onions are softened and you can smell the fragrance of the beef sauce. Add a cup of red wine. You can use any red wine. Add a bay leaf. Continue to cook over a medium fire. Do this until the wine evaporates and the sauce thickens.

5. Add the bottle of bolognese into the pot and cook with the minced beef sauce, maintain medium heat over the pot.

6. In another smaller pot with boiling hot water but with the fire off, poach two eggs. You can crack an egg into cling wrap, give the package a twist and then sous vide the egg in the water bath until it is cooked. Depending on your preference, the eggs can be either firm or watery-runny.

7. Once the Ragu sauce is ready, add the cooked penne pasta into the pot and give it a good mix. Add the reserved broth of pasta water into the pot to allow the sauce to combine with the pasta easily.

8. Once pasta is well mixed with the Ragu sauce, grate the entire block of Parmigiano Reggiano (aka Parmesan) cheese into the pasta and give it another good mix.

9. Serve the pasta with additional parsley and basil leaves and gently place the poached eggs into the pasta. Serve hot.

Bon Appetit!

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Roast the pine nuts until they start to brown.

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Cook the penne 11 minutes

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Marinate the minced beef with salt and black pepper.

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Chop the yellow onion

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Slice cherry tomatoes into halves.

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Sweet Basil Leaves

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Italian parsley and a can of anchovies.

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Stir Fry the ingredients

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Preparing to poach the egg in cling wrap.

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Twist it into a small package for the water bath.

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In a hot water bath, poach the eggs to desired doneness.

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Grate the entire block of Parmigiano reggiano cheese into the pasta.

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Deliciously yummy Ragu Pasta with poached egg.

Beef and Carrot Soup

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Beef and Carrot Soup

I am making a very simple Beef and Carrot Soup for dinner tonight. Beef provides the necessary iron nutrition for my toddler and I am pairing it with carrots because they both do very well together.

My son loves carrots, so I have added a little more carrots just so that he can mix it into his rice for dinner. I am adding a few slices of ginger, just 5 thin slices (5 being the number of Grace) just so that the beef soup would taste really nice. My maternal grandmother used to make this really nice beef and carrot soup for us kids when we visit on Sundays. So this is a really nice memory for me.

I am also adding half a slice of dried cuttlefish into the soup to sweeten the broth. Cuttlefish has that magic touch to bring the soup together and make it extremely tasty. I will complete the soup tonight with Chinese Celery. I recently discovered that food stall holders have been using a lot of the Chinese celery as opposed to the Chinese parsley for their garnishing. It appears, and I think it is true as well, that the Chinese celery’s strong flavour works very well with meats in general.

Just a simple and very easy recipe for dinner. Cooked in a thermal cooker for a good 10-12 hours so that the meats will be tender and soft for toddler and delicious for everyone.

Recipe

Ingredients

250 grams Shin Beef cubes
2-3 medium Carrots
Half a Dried Cuttlefish (really good for flavour)
Sea Salt (adjust according to your tastebuds)
5 thin slices of Ginger
2 stalks of Chinese Celery (to be added into the soup just before serving)

Method

1. As I am using a thermal cooker, I need a large kettle of boiling water for the soup. I am boiling the meat for a good 15 minutes at high heat before putting it into the thermal cooker for slow cooking.

2. I got Shin Beef cubes as they are cheap and since I am slow cooking the meats, it will be tender by the end of the day anyway, so the cheapest cuts of beef will be good enough.

3. The only thing that I need to prepare would be the carrots and ginger as the beef cubes are already prepared by the butcher, so that’s very convenient as I am always short for time in the mornings.

4. Peel and cut the carrots into bite size pieces. Then put all the prepared ingredients into the pot (just like the picture above) for the grand opening ceremony. Pour the hot boiling water into the pot and turn up the heat. Boil at high heat for 15 minutes and by then you should also be able to smell the fragrance of the beef soup taking shape.

5. Come back by the end of the day to re-boil the soup. This time, add the chopped Chinese celery and boil until it bubbles. The soup is now ready to be served.

Bon Appetit!

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Delicious beef and carrot soup

Saveur Art (Review)

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Saveur Art (Review)

I wasn’t sure if I was saveuring the simplicity in the art or the art of simplicity. In more ways than one, Saveur Art as a restaurant is truly a pleasant dining experience. Discrete and notably classy, so different from the many restaurants that tries its best to impress the discerning customer.

The nicely done medium Australian Angus Bavette was served with delicious mash potato and pickled red wine onions. The meal was executed with a technical excellence that only an expert with meats would understand. Simple and absolutely enjoyable. None of the frills of seasonal vegetables as accompaniment.

Maybe it was because it was located in a rather atas place at the iconic ION Orchard (level 4). Or maybe they already decided to set a different experience for their customers, slightly different from their small chain of simple but fantastic French cuisine.

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I ordered the pumpkin soup for starters and I must say it was a welcome surprise with bespoke foam of some sort and a hint of spice. The soup was very smooth and savory, and we all loved it. It kind of reminded me of roasted pumpkin soup but this one tasted really good.

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We loved mushrooms, so we ordered a serving of the sauteed forest mushrooms. It was an acquired taste for the family though, as we were usually familiar with the few varitel types like button, oyster and portobello. So the selection of mushrooms served at Saveur Art took a little getting used to. And as the name suggests, the selection had a deep earthy taste. I like mushrooms so it didn’t bother me all that much but my wife skipped it altogether.

Service-wise, the staffs were discrete and understood service and that meant a lot to me since we eat out quite a fair bit. Two thumbs up for me. I would definitely revisit and try something else, but the Angus holds dear to my heart.

Har Cheong Gai 虾酱鸡

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Har Cheong Gai 虾酱鸡

I am frying up some chicken wings for a social later and what better food item to bring than Shrimp Paste Chicken Wings. Kids love it, everyone I know loves it. I also know my friends would love my Roasted Pork Belly, but maybe leave that for another time.

Har Cheong Gai is basically chicken wings marinated in shrimp paste which gives it the fragrant shrimp paste flavour. It’s become quite popular at most zi char places in fact and my family would often order it when we have our meals out.

So I decided to make this delicious shrimp paste chicken for our friends’ gathering. Shrimp paste chicken is also know as har cheong gai in Cantonese or 虾酱鸡 in Mandarin. I am doing a quick and dirty version of it and basically shorten the cooking time as I am usually quite busy as a working parent.

In my recipe, I only allowed it to marinate for 15 minutes before I would fry up the whole batch of mid joint chicken wings. Just to experiment and see if the flavour is just as good.

Thankfully what turned out eventually was a nicely battered chicken wing with a light hint of shrimp paste and not salty at all like most zi char places. It was deliciously fragrant and tasted really yummy. Best part is, it wasn’t that difficult to do either.

However, since there was deep frying involved, and I didn’t like the idea of wasting too much oil, I opted for a smaller cooking pot instead. The compromise was that I could only fry in smaller batches, which took up a lot more time. Plus it made the kitchen really oily after all that heavy frying, and my wife didn’t like that. So I guess this is the first and last time I am making Har Cheong Gai. LOL.

Recipe

Ingredients

To marinate:
1 Kg Chicken Wings (mid joint wings only, about 27 pieces)
2 tbsp Shrimp Paste (I got mine from the Malay uncle stall at the wet market, but you may opt to use Lee Kum Kee Shrimp Sauce)
4 tbsp Hakka Rice Wine (you can substitute it with Hsiao Sing Hua Tiao Jiu)
2 tbsp Sesame Seed Oil
2 tbsp Oyster Sauce
2 tbsp Castor Sugar
1 tsp White Pepper Powder

Making the Batter:
3/4 cup Plain Flour
3/4 cup Potato Starch
2 Eggs
1 tsp Baking Soda
200 ml Water

Method

1. In a large mixing bowl, prepare the marinate by pouring in the shrimp paste, rice wine, sesame seed oil, oyster sauce, white pepper and sugar. Mix well.

2. Add the mid joint chicken wings into the mixture and make sure all the wings are coated. Allow it to marinate for 15 minutes.

3. Meanwhile prepare the Batter mix in another mixing bowl. Add the plain flour, potato starch, baking soda, eggs, water and give it a good mix until a smooth consistency.

4. Dip the marinated chicken wings into the batter (discard the remainder marinate) and then slowly dip them into the pot of boiling hot oil for deep frying. Fry for about 4 minutes each or until the chicken wing joints browns and  float on the surface of the oil bath.

5. Allow the chicken wings to cool on the rack before plating. You may serve it with lemon, vinegar and garlic chilli sauce.

Bon Appetit!

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Marinate the chicken wings for 15 minutes

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Prepare the Batter mixture

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Dip the chicken wings in the Batter before frying

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Rest the fried chicken wings in the cooling rack

Stir Fry Wing Beans in Garlic and Tomato

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Stir Fry Wing Beans in Garlic and Tomato

I cooked this dish in belacan the other time and it was delicious. So this time around, I did a Chinese spin on it. Decided to cooked it with garlic and tomatoes and some signature Chinese sauces and ingredients and surprisingly the taste was excellent. It just made us want to eat more.

Kacang Botol as the locals call it, its origins are kind of mysterious to me. It seems the exotic wing bean originates from New Guinea. Well at least that is what Wikipedia tells me. The fragrance of the garlic and the sweetness of the tomatoes adds to the taste of this simple dish.

A little light soya sauce, oyster sauce and dried Chinese Scallops and the umami in the dish turns up a few notches to a fever-pitched confluence of familiar flavours. Very nice and easy to cook.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 packet of Wing Beans
4 cloves Garlic
1 large Tomato
5 pieces Dried Chinese Scallops
1 tsp Sesame Seed Oil
1 tsp Light Soya Sauce
1 tbsp Oyster Sauce
4-5 tbsp Olive Oil

Method

1. Peel and rough chop the garlic pieces. Then cut the tomato into slices. Wash the wing beans then cut them into bite size pieces.

2. Heat the oil in the wok and add the garlic to stir fry. Make sure the garlic pieces are not burnt. Moderate the heat to medium. Then add the scallops (unsoaked) to fry. Then add the tomatoes. Fry till tomatoes are softened. Then add the wing beans. Continue frying. Add a little water.

3. Add soya sauce, sesame seed oil and a little oyster sauce in a bowl. Then pour mixture into the wok. If it is too dry, add more water. Then cover the lid and allow the vegetable to cook through for about 4-5 minutes.

4. The sauce should have thickened and the wing beans softened slightly. Do a test taste and it should still be crunchy in texture. Serve with steam rice.

Bon Appetit!

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Stir Fry Wing Bean in Garlic and Tomato

Stir Fry Mini Sweet Peppers

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Stir Fry Mini Sweet Peppers

My mother bought these Mini Sweet Peppers from the supermarket and gave it to me for frying. Apparently these little fellas are distant cousins of the larger bell peppers.

I usually roast these peppers in extra virgin olive oil, sea salt and lemon juice, but since we are having rice for dinner tonight, I will do a simple Chinese styled oyster sauce bell peppers and maybe a sprinkle of castor sugar to accentuate the sweetness.

The result is a sweet savoury dish that went really well with steamed rice. Perfect, simple and delicious.

Do you need a recipe for this? It’s actually very simple, just these peppers and oyster sauce, cook them until some of the peppers start to brown. That’s it. Easy.

Bon Appetit!

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Look at the lovely hues of red and yellow and orange. Very nice.

Siam Square Mookata (Review)

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Siam Square Mookata (Review)

It’s date night and thank God for precious date nights after marriage. My parents offered to take care of the toddler while we enjoyed a semblance of time together when we were dating. Thank God for understanding parents.

And as my aunty told me before so wisely, “don’t waste time watching movies when you date.. Go have a meal..” she advised. Those were words worth its weight in gold. The simple reasoning behind those words were, you can’t get to know and understand each other if you don’t communicate. Conversations over a good meal are way better than watching a movie.

So we decided to have Thai BBQ for dinner as we could better afford the time and what better place than to try out Thai Mookata Steamboat and BBQ (in a nutshell it is BBQ meats, seafoods and vegetables on a rather unique looking hotplate with soup combination). I did a search and realised that there was only one outlet in Singapore. It was at East Coast Road and kind of out of the way.

Also I knew it can’t be true as I was sure there were plenty more of these Thai BBQ places around, most notably the ones located all over Golden Mile Complex. So I did another search but this time more ambiguous and that result yielded more than 50 weblinks of Thai BBQ places in Singapore. Nice.

Plus my friend told me that there was a tiny stall at a coffee shop located at Block 332 Ang Mo Kio Ave 8 (just behind Christ The King Catholic Church). Siam Square Mookata was the name of that stall and it seems the reviews of the place are that they were “cheap and good”.

That sounded good with us and off we went. I remembered there was a time almost all of our construction was completed by Thai foreign workers. And that just makes sense that Thai food places begun springing up all over the island to cater to their tastes and needs and over time everyone loves Thai foods as well.

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It was just a tiny little stall space in a coffee shop and their BBQ plates of ingredients were reasonably priced at either $1.80, $2.80 or greater as you order the more premium stuff like scallops ($3.80).

They have a rather interesting price menu where they offer ala carte prices first and if you feel at any one time you would wanna go all out at the buffet, you can change to buffet price (about $29 per person). Of course the caveat is you can only switch to buffet price if you are still ordering another round of items and not when you are paying up. But the stall people are very nice about it, they will frequently ask if we wanted to convert to buffet. Such nice people, always thinking for their customers.

Apart from that, the freshness of the ingredients was undeniably good, and for what it’s worth, the entire experience was very nice. They offered both marinated and meats without marinate, but I preferred them plain without the sauces. They taste much nicer after BBQ-ing. Plus it wasn’t crowded even at dinner time, so that was an added bonus. I always love these quaint coffee shop places that are located next to a big spacious carpark, it just gives me a feeling of comfort and I am naturally at ease.

Conclusion

So would I go again? Maybe, if I lived nearer. They didn’t offer anything very special, and in the end we almost ordered the equivalent of their buffet price. But still a very nice experience.

Dancing Crab (Review)

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Dancing Crab (Review)

So it’s Father’s day today and my wifey planned a secret lunch for me – how sweet. I can only say I was happily and pleasantly surprised when she brought me to the Dancing Crab for Father’s day lunch.

At the door I already had visual hallucinations of how it would be like, like the colourful pages of a Singapore Cookbook that I saw at the book store. I can’t wait to sink my teeth into the crabs and be so totally satisfied. This is the second outlet as compared to the first one which is located at some inaccessible location. So this outlet at Orchard Central makes sense for a lot of customers.

The friendly staff made the lunch experience special. Although the pseudo American accent was a tad too much for me. I guess it is after-all an American styled diner with country music and whiny guitar solos.

We ordered the Combo #1 and that came with the Sri Lankan crab, prawns, clams and some vegetables all mixed in a mild spicy ang mo styled tomato sauce. It tasted mildly fusion as I was half expecting to eat boiled crabs and shrimp and had hope to savor in all that fresh juiciness. Maybe we should have chosen a different sauce? Was there a different sauce? I didn’t really check and just said “mild” when prompted for the level of spiciness.

It’s always a good practice to take the least spicy level when you are not familiar with the place. Make sure you start at the bottom and work your way upwards. But the sauce made the crab taste like a chilli crab recipe that kind of “lost its way” while trying to cater to the Boston palate.

Also, I thought our Sri Lankan crab looked a wee bit tiny as compared to the guys they displayed in the fish tank. So we checked with the waitress and she confirmed that it was Sri Lankan.

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So our crab and shrimp combo came in a pot and we were supposed to eat it with our fingers and get our hands dirty. The tables were all covered with plastic sheets so that we can pour (literally) our meal all over the table. Interesting idea, just that the tables were a tad too small for us to do that without having our food falling off the table.

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The mild spicy tomato based sauce kind of masked the taste of the seafood for me and for some reason, I couldn’t enjoy my seafood like I usually do. But you might like it, who knows, different tastebuds and preferences. But it didn’t work the magic for me this time.

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The truffle fries were very nicely done. We loved it – including our toddler. He munched and munched and totally loved it. The truffle flavour in the fries made us want to munch continuously and that is a sign that they got it right.

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The refreshing spin on the lemonades are good. I ordered two flavours, the pink thyme lemonade and the lavender lemonade. And as much as I hate lavender flavour in my foods (because lavender reminds me of the toilet because my office loves using lavender flavoured toilet freshener) the lavender lemonade tasted much nicer than the pink thyme which was strange, but good.

Conclusion

Would I go back there again? Maybe not, but I am sure it appeals to many many people.

D13

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D13

It’s durian season again. Yay! For those that hate the fruit, totally understand why you guys would hate it. The pungent smells can be quite overwhelming for haters. For those that love the fruit, I am with you guys all the way.

The fruit guy at the wet market also decided to ride on the bandwagon of the twice a year durian season and decidedly stocked up on a few basket of durians for his discerning customers.

Sadly he doesn’t have the clout to get the Mao Shan Wang 猫山王 that he ordered from the durian plantation guy, and all he got were D13 which was kind of like the bottom grade of all durians (it’s so bottom-grade, they may as well freeze dry these guys and pack them into packets). Any grade lower than D13 and we might drop into the luxurious professional camera category with the D4. That one cannot eat. Likewise if someone tries to sell you a Nikon D13, they might be referring to durians.

Secretly I think the durian plantation guy doesn’t think much of the fruit guy. He could have offered something else of higher grade or at least a small selection of Mao Shan Wang. Either that or I think the fruit guy may be trying to smoke me.

So is the D13 any good compared to its more glamorous siblings? It’s not bad but only at the peak of the durian season which is now. Everything that remotely looks and tastes like durian – tastes good. The varietal differences are still noticeable of course, you can’t compare bicycle to motorcycle, but there have been shades of bitter sweetness similar to the likes of the Mao Shan Wang.

For 1 kg at $8 it is pretty pricey for the heartland fruit stall. I am sure if I scour the durian haunts they would be selling them for much lower. In fact my sources tell me that the Mao Shan Wang is now 1 kg $13 at some of the more popular places ( information accurate as at 19 June 2015).

I think I might have gotten ripped off. I only managed to yield 10 seeds out of the two D13 durians that I bought from the fruit guy. Oh well. It’s like that. At least these two that he sold me looked and tasted gorgeous. I think I might go back to him and haggle for a better price.

Bon Appetit!

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Beautiful D13

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My wife braving her polished nails. What sacrifice!

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Most definitely worth it!

Salted Egg Cereal Prawns

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Salted Egg Cereal Prawns

Got a day off today and I went to the supermarket and saw some really nice grey prawns. They were of reasonable size and I thought it would be perfect if I made Salted Egg Cereal Prawns.

My wife wanted me to make her favourite Garlic Tomato Prawns for dinner but I decided that I would try out something different and technically a little more demanding. I always like a little challenge in my cooking.

So I turned on my favourite techno house music and started preparing for dinner. I purposely kept the prawns cold in the fridge until it was time to cook because I saw on tv some tempura chef mentioned that the prawns need to be chilled just before deep frying them. Besides that, everything else is standard in my opinion.

Recipe

Ingredients

12 Grey Prawns (refrigerate the prawns until just before cooking)
1 packet of crispy Cereal (I bought the A1 brand at NTUC and it’s very convenient to use, you may also consider the classic Quaker Oatmeal if you like that.)
4 Salted Eggs
3 sprigs of Curry Leaves (in reality there is a lot of wastage, NTUC doesn’t sell 3 sprigs of curry leaves)
30 grams of Unsalted Butter
4 tbsp Corn Starch
2 Eggs (chicken eggs)
1 tsp Chicken Stock powder
A sprinkle of White Pepper powder
Olive Oil (for deep frying)

Method

1. Take the prawns out of the fridge and de-shell them leaving only the heads and tail (as the saying goes in hokkien, woo-tau-woo-buay lit. in mandarin 有头有尾). By now you would have cracked the two eggs into a bowl with the chicken stock and white pepper and given it a good mix.

2. In another plate, the corn starch is spread out and ready to go. Heat the oil in the wok and get it ready for deep frying. Using a pair of chopsticks, pick up the prawns dip in egg batter, then in corn starch coating and then into the hot oil.

3. You generally want to give the prawns a good fry of about 15 seconds. So you got to moderate an assembly line. 1st prawn goes in, then you prepare the next prawn, turn the prawn in the wok when you place the next prawn in and the third prawn is being dipped in batter.

4. Once the prawns have had 15 seconds of oil. Drop them into a strainer. Once all the prawns are cooked, turn off the fire and dip them into the hot oil all at once. Then strain them again.

5. Prepare the salted eggs (it would be good to cook them way before you even take the prawns out of the fridge). Salted Eggs are not cooked and are raw. So you got to factor that into your cooking time. Extract the yolks and you can use the whites for porridge.

6. In a clean wok, melt the butter. Be careful not to burn the butter. Add the salted egg yolks to cook. Using your frying paddle to mesh the yolks into the butter. This forms your sauce. Add the curry leaves at this point and the packet of crispy Cereal flakes. You can use whatever cereal flake you like, it doesn’t really matter.

7. Moderate the heat and stir quickly so that the butter doesn’t become clumpy. Immediately add the prawns into the wok and stir vigorously to coat the prawns with the cereal flakes.

8. Once prawns are all more or less coated with the cereal flakes. You may serve immediately.

Bon Appetit!

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Certified shiok!

Basa Bocourti Fish

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Basa Bocourti Fish

The Basa Bocourti fish as the name suggests is really a Basa Fish aka the Mekong River catfish commonly found in Vietnam’s boutique street wet markets. They are very fleshy and are commonly found in their rivers. The fish when cooked has a nice sweet flavour unlike the cheaper Toman fish

This fish is also nicely filleted and packed at NTUC. Good for me because now I can just pick it up from the supermarket without having to haggle with the street side vendor, although I would gladly do the latter. There is something whimsical about market place values that the supermarket just can’t emulate.

Boil a very nice pot of porridge and lightly salt the Basa Fish and you will have a very nice fish porridge. The flesh when cooked is paper white and also flaky although not as firm as the Red Garoupa. There is virtually no bones with the fikkets which is strange but I am not complaining. So it is very safe for toddlers to have them for meals.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 Basa Bocourti Fillet (about $2.50 for a rather large fillet, portion enough for 3 pax)

The rest of the ingredients and steps you can follow the recipe for my Red Garoupa Fish Porridge.

Bon Appetit!

Red Garoupa Fish Porridge

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Red Garoupa Fish Porridge

If there is a fish porridge that I like better than Batang or Bay Kah fish porridge, it would be Red Garoupa. The firm flesh of the fish just makes for very nice fish porridge, though some older folks will say that it is loh koh (read: hard to eat). I say porridge but you might call it congee. It is the same to me actually.

But it is a fish that is a joy to work with. Slicing is so easy and the flesh is firm and tender at the same time. Just a simple marinate of light soya sauce and the fish slices when cooked is a lovely sweet savoury flavour, and flaky too because that is an indication of freshness. Then add a garnish of shredded Chinese celery and you are good to go.

Recipe

Ingredients

Red Garoupa steak (about 150 grams for 1 portion)
Chinese Celery 2-3 stalks (these are very thin stalks)
Light Soya Sauce 1 tbsp
Sesame Seed Oil 1 tsp
Dried Chinese Scallops 5 pieces
Half a cup of Rice (to be boiled for porridge)

Method

1. Boil the uncooked grains of rice in a pot for about 15 minutes over medium heat. Longer if you want it to be very mushy. Add more water if you like it watery. Throw the scallops into the pot to flavour the porridge.

2. Slice the flesh of the Garoupa meat thinly and marinate it with the soya sauce and sesame seed oil. Leave it in the fridge for about 10 minutes.

3. Once porridge is boiling and rice grains are soft and broken down, you can add the fish slices in to cook. As seafood doesn’t need to cook very long, about 5 minutes would be suffice. The flesh should be paper white and nicely curved after cooking.

4. Add the shredded Chinese celery into the porridge for that lovely flavour. Add some more light soya sauce if you want your porridge tastier.

Bon Appetit!

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Marinated slices of fish

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Shredded Chinese celery

The Beef House (Review)

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The Beef House (Review)

Got a rare chance to go Jalan Besar today, and I thought I would grab myself a bowl of this delicious Hakka Beef Balls. I asked the boss for a $4 bowl of beef balls otherwise known as “kosong” (read: only beef balls and no noodles or bee hoon).

The boss or the guy that cooks the beef balls is quite funny. I say this because he speaks to his customers like we are all kids. But I guess that’s his way of overcoming his awkwardness and it could be his feeble attempts at small talk. Cooking beef balls all day is not exactly very exciting as you can imagine.

But who cares right? As long as the food is good, everything else is forgivable.

The Hakka Beef Balls are a mixture of meat and tendon bits and they are very juicy and delicious. Mix this with their chilli and the umami in this dish heightens almost immediately. One wonders how they actually manage to do it so well.

Presentation-wise, they score a big fat zero; but it’s 100 marks for taste. It’s a very simple meal to say the least. Even the soup they gave me was so little, as if it was so precious. Sometimes I think they forget that we are paying customers. I usually have it with bee hoon (read: white vermicelli noodles).

Few things are so perfect together as Hakka Beef Balls and bee hoon noodles. If you want a bowl, make sure you get there before they close at 5pm. They only operate Monday to Friday, so you can basically write them off for your usual Saturday morning fooding adventure.

Located at 217, Syed Alwi road, the beef house sells other Hakka favourites like suan pan zi (read: abacus discs), Hakka Yong Tau Foo and Hakka Soon Kueh (read: tapioca steam dumplings).

Bon Appetit!

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Yu Kee Bak Chor Mee (Review)

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Yu Kee Bak Chor Mee (Review)

The NTUC Foodfare at Sembawang MRT just opened after a brief period of renovation and this time around I think they got it right. The layout of the place is now more sensible and it actually is much more spacious for their customers. Maybe they heard the cries of the populous masses that flow through their doors everyday.

But that’s not the purpose of my rambling, don’t worry. I don’t usually rant and rave about food court renovation designs.

So it seems Yu Kee has opened its own Bak Chor Mee. Yes, the famous Duck Rice guys are also selling BCM. I can’t say that I would disagree with their move, after all there is no existing Bak Chor Mee place at the food court.

So by this offering, their profits increase. People are predisposed to eating bak chor mee in the morning especially me. I love bcm and I can eat it everyday. It is comfort food to me.

So the question is, “is this yu kee bak chor mee any good?” The honest answer would be, “it fills the gap” (tongue in cheek). It is not exactly the best bcm, but it has all the elements of a standard bcm should carry.

My wife thinks I love bcm too much to give these guys a bad review. But there is nothing much to penalise them for. It’s not fantastic but it is not bad either. And especially so in the early morning when the other shops are not yet functioning, I think they make a very nice bak chor mee.

Try it if you are nearby, but I won’t drive my Ferrari down for this.

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Mala Hotpot (Review)

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Mala Hotpot (Review)

Mala Hotpot has become so popular in Singapore in recent years such that it is almost impossible to ignore it. In fact it has become somewhat a staple for some as they crave and savor the insane levels of spiciness in the dish.

I remember doing a half-baked review of this other Mala place named 日日生麻辣香锅 which was located in Chinatown and another outlet in Tampines. The most outstanding difference is that they charge the items according to the portion as opposed to most other places that charge it according to type of ingredients and its weight.

But I also mentioned that my favourite Mala Hotpot had to be the one at Tampines Mall at the Kopitiam Food court. The prices are exorbitant as they charge according to weight of the ingredients and prices range from a low ten to about twenty dollars for a bowl.

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You can choose from a huge variety of ingredients and they are mostly fresh as the stall is quite popular. So at least the ingredients enjoy high turnover, which is good. I love it because they use a particular soya bean to fry the ingredients and it is delicious.

I usually take the 少辣 (read: least spicy) version of the Mala Hotpot so that I could enjoy my lunch but that day I decided to have the works and opted for 大辣 (read: very spicy). Thinking back it was most definitely a mistake.

At level 3 spiciness, which was also the maximum level of spiciness before it becomes illegal, your tastebuds are wretched and there is very little taste of anything else except the stinging and burning sensation of the chilli. It’s Mala Hotpot Hell if there was such a thing as Mala Hotpot Paradise. Neither exist, but you can imagine the agony and pain that my mouth was going through.

But the sadist in me rather enjoyed it and finished the entire bowl but at the same time vowed silently to never order these ridiculous levels again. In fact when I ordered, the counter guy let out a smirk and laughed to himself. He probably thought I was being silly. He wasn’t wrong to have thought that way. It was foolhardy. Maybe I should consider buying my own Mala Hot Sauce to cook at home. Now that would be a pretty good idea.

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Don’t get me wrong, I still love Mala Hotpot even though there was no trace of umami in this dish. It was very nicely prepared and I would still eat there. By far it is one of my favourite Mala Hotpot places. My favourite ingredients to order would be the mushrooms (all types) and chewy soya bean sticks and big intestines. Shiok!

Bon Appetit!

Wanton Mee (Review)

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Wanton Mee (Review)

Some people say it is sacrilegious to do a kway kar mee review (read: Chicken Feet Noodles) and not have one for the quintessential wanton mee. Alright, guilty, as charged. Here you go. But it’s the same stall at Sembawang Estate wat. Google maps it: postal code 751313

Anyway my wife wanted sui jiao mian (read: shrimp/meat dumplings) for breakfast and I thought I may as well have wanton mee (read: dumpling noodles). And thus the opportunity to do this somewhat half-baked review on a very lazy Saturday morning.

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It was going to be a long wait for the delicious noodles. The queue on weekends was usually long and convoluted. It was insane to say the least. The stall this morning was surrounded as if the wanton mee uncle kena ambushed. I bet something’s up.

It was always interesting to see the reactions on the faces of the people waiting. And they usually like to crowd around the stall waiting for their orders. I think more so if they felt that the queuing system had been compromised for whatever reason. It’s usually like that.

As a seasoned Singaporean foodie, I was determined and unfazed by these petty squabbles, my mission is to get my wanton mee and nothing short of a nuclear explosion would stop me. But I totally understand the frustration of waiting and having your orders missed out.

So I thanked the guy, albeit silently, when he left in a huff of deprived anguish of having to wait “very long” for his takeaway. I guess he decided that pride and dignity was more important to him than being slow talked
by some wanton mee uncle. As for me, I have no problems with waiting, and quickly made my order.

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Two eggs and a cup of kopi is the best way to “wait for the wanton mee order” IMHO. The kopi auntie told me 4 minutes and this time I decided to use my heightened powers of estimation to time the cooking of my precious soft boiled eggs.

Sadly, I was unfortunately distracted by Candy Crush and my eggs were slightly overcooked, and the rest is like they say – history. I slurped the eggs in a hurry and just as I was about to wash it down with coffee, the wanton mee uncle came by and said “你有order吗? 好了! Wanton Mee 跟水饺面 c bo?”

Very nice indeed.

Bon Appetit!

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Chicken Feet Noodles (Review)

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Chicken Feet Noodles (Review)

I don’t usually review heartland delights, but sometimes these boutique cooks of local delicacies are so adept at their craft that it warrants notable praise. Sometimes they behave like artisan chefs much like the ones I recently met at DSTLLRY.

The only difference between them is that the heartland uncle and auntie working at the wanton mee stall spend, and also have, less time making small talk with their customers but spend more time churning out the food. But that aside, the intensity with which they operate is just fever-pitched madness if you think about it. Sometimes customer orders for their wanton mee can be 10 packets at a time. It’s an endless stream of noodles flying in and out of the strainer scoop. The signature whacking of the ladle against the edge of the cooking pot is also very telling – “the chef is making brisk bucks”. Okay I just had to say that.

So today, I decided to try their kway kar mee (read: chicken feet noodles) and it’s nothing short of oh-my-gosh awesome!

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The delicately braised chicken feet or kway kar was just simply delicious. I added an extra order of their fabulous wanton which I couldn’t get enough of. It cost me an additional 50 cents! Amazing value.

The way they make their meat dumplings just reminds me of those dim sum places, very Hong Kong style. You probably had better wanton noodles but for the price ($3 and if you add wanton it’s additional 50 cents) and the fact that it was within my estate, I thought it was a rare find and a gem. It is the same price for the kway kar mee, so that’s a major plus for me. Some places sell chicken feet noodles a little more expensive than the regular wanton noodles.

Here’s the postal code location for those die hard fans who would want to venture a kway kar mee expedition. Go ahead Google maps it, it’s chicken feet I’m sure.

Postal Code: 751313

Bon Appetit!

Dstllry (Review)

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Dstllry (Review)

We booked a session for omakase dinner at the artistic bar/restaurant Dstllry the other night for my wife’s birthday, and we got lost. I think that’s probably the first experience that the business owner Andrew Lum would have you experience. Unwittingly of course.

We booked the 6.30pm slot for their Japanese fusion omakase dinner (which has recently got some nice reviews) and were just minutes away from the area and then we realised that we were lost and have been going around in circles (incidentally they are located at media circle). We circled Infinite Studios once and then decided that it was enough circling and called the restaurant for directions but still we couldn’t see anything that remotely resembled a Japanese restaurant.

And then with clues and hints, we arrived at what looked like an art/photo gallery of some sort with a music stand outside with a message that read “Dstllry is open”. Okay, I really didn’t expect that.

I was half expecting some Japanese looking venue with traditional Japanese wordings and bannerettes of samurais with their tongues sticking out and their menacing blades.

And as we pushed opened the glass door, we were immediately embraced with the jazzy tunes of ambient lounge music. Nice. Instantly, I felt at home and liked the place. A large door left slightly ajar revealed an even darker interior, kind of like a dragon and dungeons risk reward adventure where warriors and knights venture into dark unknowns. We had none of that I assure you. But what we saw was interesting and fresh.

We were suddenly greeted with a bustle of activity and laughter with a dimly lit centralized bar counter staffed with bartenders and omakase artisan chefs. It was a very nice play on the lighting I must admit. Surreal, mysterious, private and very discreet indeed.

At first glance it felt like we were entering into the dark room of a large photo studio but when we got in, it was totally not what we expected it to be. So that was a nice surprise.

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There was enough lighting at the bar for the staff to work and for customers to see what they were going to consume. It was very well planned and executed. Kudos to the brains behind the business and the genius of weaving everything together.

The amazing thing that struck me most was the amount of space there was. You could literally fit an army in there and yet that didn’t bother the owner. “it’s all about the experience..” said the master distiller Andrew Lum with a serious look on his face. The concentration and focus of activity was definitely at the bar and that was exactly where we were led to and seated.

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We were offered a nice corner at the bar and that was to be where we were going to do dinner. Very simple yet delicately planned. The intention was to have customers interact with staff and that was what our chatty bartender did all night.

The bar consisted of two main sections with a huge array of spirits hording the centre of the bar. A small section for a-la-carte customers for their bar menu and the rest (about 12 seats) for omakase. There is also production grade music equipment located right at the back where Andrew would work on his musician projects, or otherwise it also doubles up as the music station for belting out those lush tunes for the restaurant.

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Everything was laid out in plain view and we could see what the chefs were doing as they busied themselves preparing our courses.

6.30pm. Here we go. The chefs plated our small dishes before us and proceeded to explain in some detail why and how they had intended to cook our meals. The music was a little too loud and all we heard were muffled explanations and descriptions. They were all premium ingredients so for the price we paid, it was very reasonable indeed.

On a scale of 10 courses, 9 of them worked for me. Notably the sashimi platter with a twist, the wagyu steak on rice and the urchin truffle vanilla ice cream. We had a very nice bottle of sake and the rest was just happy chatter and a great night out. Here are some photos to whet your appetite. Better hurry they change their menus on a monthly basis.

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Crab Bee Hoon

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Crab Bee Hoon

If you have tasted Singapore Chilli Crab and like it, you will most probably love crab bee hoon like you love your mother-in-law. Okay, maybe not a good example, but think of crab bee hoon as a softer option compared to the spicy version.

Cooked in a milky buttery broth and served with bee hoon or white noodles, this masterpiece dish is very easy to cook. I say again, anyone can cook this dish. It’s a walk in the park. Add a little tang-orh vegetables and it is a perfect meal.

We usually go to this place at Ang Mo Kio named Melben for our craving for crab bee hoon, but honestly, they have become quite pricey and sometimes the journey there and the long waiting time just makes the whole experience much to be desired.

So I decided that I would make my own crab bee hoon but make it more fabulous with what my wife and I love to eat. Udon noodles instead of the bee hoon. LOL. In fact, I think it tasted better with Udon.

Recipe

Ingredients

2 “live” Mud Crabs (about 800 grams)
2 packets of Udon Noodles
20 thin slices of Ginger
1 tray of Fresh Clam Meat (NTUC got sell)
1 box Mini Toufu Puffs
60 grams of Unsalted Butter
Half a cup of Evaporated Milk
A pinch of Sea Salt (I use the Maldon Brand of Sea Salt Flakes)
2 tbsp Shao Xing Hua Tiao Jiu
2 tbsp Hakka Rice Wine
1 tsp Castor Sugar
1 tbsp Fish Sauce

Method

1. Boil 1 and a half kettle of water. (1 kettle is about 1.7 litres) Once the water is boiled, pour into a large pot. Turn on fire to a slow boil and add the clam meat and 10 slices of ginger. Boil for about 30 minutes. Then discard the clams and ginger.

2. In another pot, fry the rest of the ginger slices in butter and then add the mini Toufu puffs (sliced diagonally) and continue cooking. Once the Toufu has softened. Add them into the main pot.

3. Turn the heat up to medium. Add evaporated milk. Add that pinch of salt, the fish sauce, hua tiao jiu, hakka rice wine and sugar. Continue to stir. Do a taste test to make sure the it is not too salty, but creamy.

4. Kill the crabs. Using a cleaver, chop right down the belly of the crab. Then remove the pincers and then the body parts. Reserve the eggs (if any) and wash the crabs. After the crabs are cleaned, using the back of the cleaver, break the shells.

5. Once crabs are ready, throw them into the broth. Cook until the colour changes to a hue of red. Add the Udon noodles (or white noodles) and cook for a few minutes. After that serve hot.

6. Prepare and wash the tang-orh vegetables. This is to be dipped into the broth and eaten immediately.

Bon Appetit!

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Boiling broth of Fresh Clam Meat & ginger slices

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Fry the ginger slices in butter

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Fry the mini Toufu puffs in butter

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Substitute bee hoon with Udon noodles

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“live” Mud crabs (about 800 grams)

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Cooked the prepared crabs

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Cooked till a bright hue of red

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Add Udon noodles into broth

Home Made Pizza

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Home Made Pizza

I love pizzas, but for most restaurants that make this lovely piece of slightly leavened bread, do it for much profit. Expensive for run of the mill pizzas and anything premium can really break your budget.

And if you decide to make it yourself, then it suddenly becomes very affordable. The ingredients are so much cheaper and the best part about making the pizza yourself is you can make as many pizzas as you like. There is no additional cost.

I bought bread flour, instant yeast, tomato puree and some other ingredients and I was on my way to making my own pizza.

Recipe

Ingredients

3 cups of Bread Flour
7 grams of Instant Yeast
A cup of lukewarm water
Pinch of Salt
1 teaspoon of Castor Sugar
3 tbsp of Olive Oil
Tomato Sauce (pasta sauce)
A punnet of Cherry Tomatoes
A punnet of White Button Mushrooms
1 packet of Wild Rockets
Mixed Mozzarella and Cheddar Cheese

Method

1. Using a kitchen aid machine (if you don’t have one, get it!) and a hook fixture attached, mix flour, yeast, sugar and salt together. Turn on low speed. Combine the ingredients well. Add the water and continue to mix well until it is well mixed.

2. Remove the dough from the machine and knead it a little. Then place the dough into a bowl and add the oil. Cling wrap and allow the dough to rise a little. While it is being left to rise and allowing the yeast to work its magic.

3. While that is working, and rising, you can prepare the other ingredients. Slice the mushrooms, cut up the cherry tomatoes and wash the rocket leaves.

4. After you have prepared the ingredients, you can knead the dough and cut it into smaller dollups. With a rolling pin, roll out the dough into whatever shape you like. (your pizza mah)

5. Spoon the tomato sauce (pasta sauce) onto the rolled out dough. Decorate it with sliced mushrooms, cherry tomato halves. Top the pizza with mix mozzarella and cheddar cheese.

6. Pre-heat the oven to a hot 230 degrees. Then bake the pizza for 10 minutes. After baking, the pizza bread should be slightly burnt and nicely roasted. Top the pizza with wild rockets and serve immediately.

Bon Appetit!

Bitter Gourd in Salted Egg

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Bitter Gourd in Salted Egg

This is a restaurant grade recipe. Haha. Okay, I wish it was. I love eating almost everything in a salted egg sauce and nothing beats eating my favourite Bitter Gourd in my favourite salted egg sauce.

It’s a quite simple dish to make really, just that to do it well, you need to know what you are doing. So if you are game for something different, you can try this. It will rock your dinners and also impress a few friends.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 whole Bitter Gourd
3 Salted Egg Yolks
Half a slab of Unsalted Butter
1 tbsp of Castor Sugar
Chicken Stock (not from stock cubes)

Method

1. Clean and gut the bitter gourd of the seeds. Cut into half. Then steam at high heat for about 5 minutes. Then slice then diagonally into bite size pieces.

2. In a wok, add half a slab of Butter, if you need directions, then half a slab of butter would be 125 grams.

3. Add the egg yolks. These eggs are cooked and hard boiled. Using the back of your frying ladle, mesh the egg yolks into the butter. Make sure the egg yolks are nicely mixed into the butter.  Ensure that it is at low heat.

4. Add chicken stock made from boiling chicken bones. Just about 3 tbsp would be sufficient. Add Sugar to taste, maybe about 1 tbsp.

5. Once that is done, ladle the sauce over the butter gourd and serve.

Bon Appetit!

Pasta Pommodoro

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Pasta Pommodoro

If there is one thing that I enjoy more than rice is pasta. I would rather have pasta anytime of the day and they are great for that much needed quick meal.

So I was hungry the other day, and decided that I would whip up a very classic Pasta Pommodoro aka Tomato Pasta. Italian pastas are usually like that, singular and simple. Uncomplicated would be the other word that I would use when describing this particular pasta.

The main ingredient and star of the dish is none other than tomatoes. With a little help from the usual suspects like garlic and good quality olive oil, the end result is a very nice single flavour pasta.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 large Tomato (you can have more if you like)
150 grams Pasta (you can have any kind of pasta, but I used Barilla Farfelle.)
2-3 pieces of Garlic
Olive Oil
Salt
A sprig of Thyme
A small can of Tomato Puree (Gilda brand has very tiny came of Tomato puree)

Method

1. Boil the pasta until al dente then reserve. In another pan, add 2 tbsp olive oil, add the minced garlic and stir fry until fragrant.

2. Then add the diced tomato and continue frying. Add some tomato paste or puree. Add a little water to dilute the sauce a little. Add the pasta into the pan. Combine the ingredients. Add the leaves of Thyme for flavour. Add salt to taste.

3. Once cooked serve with grated parmesan.

Bon Appetit!

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Pommodoro aka Tomatoes

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Pasta

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Thyme

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Pasta Pommodoro

Special Fried Egg

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Special Fried Egg

I called this dish Special Fried Egg because I really didn’t want to call it Fried Egg with Prawns Pork Minced and French Beans. That would be a tad too long for a title of dish, and remembering that it is important to name your dishes so that it won’t be too obvious. So there, Special Fried Egg.

Of course there is nothing very special about this dish except that it has quite a few ingredients all combined together. Fresh glass prawns are really good for this although a tad expensive. You may just use grey shrimp. Much cheaper and you won’t burn a hole in the wallet. Add regular minced pork and French beans and there you go. Comfort food that every kid who used to eat at home before fast food chains came along and dominated our tastebuds with salt and all things unwholesome.

Putting this special fried egg together was really a walk down memory lane for me. My nanny used to cook this dish for lunch every other week. It has become somewhat a cult classic for me. The taste, textures, the classic burnt edges. They all make up what this classic dish should be.

Recipe

Ingredients

3 large Glass Prawns
60 grams of Minced Pork
10 pieces of French Beans
2 whole Eggs
Light Soya Sauce

Method

1. De-shell the prawns and use only the meat. Chop into a paste. Then mix with the minced pork. Now use a heavy cleaver, chop and continue to combine the two ingredients until they become one paste.

2. Cut the French Beans into small pieces. Discard either ends. Assemble all the ingredients into a large bowl. Crack the eggs into the bowl. The egg acts as the social glue. Add soya sauce about 1 tbsp.

3. Now use your hands to mix. I like getting my hands dirty. Leave it to marinate a while.

4. Add oil into a wok (if you don’t know what a good wok looks like, you may want to refer to this Helen Chen non-stick pan). Turn heat up high. Pour the mixture into the frying pan and allow it to cook and congeal. Then do the magic flip and repeat on the other side. Use as much oil as you like. It has to be cooked nicely.

Bon Appetit!

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Special Fried Egg

Fish Ball Bee Hoon Soup

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Fish Ball Bee Hoon Soup

The interesting about Asian foods is that they usually name it by describing its contents, there is hardly any pizzazz in the naming of the dish. It’s probably a dish created by the man in the street for the man in the street. I can’t find any other reason why you would call fish ball bee hoon soup by any other name.

Other foods like laksa or lor mee sound like they were created in a more refined kitchen. Maybe I am just guessing, but I think it is quite a fair assumption to think that way. It’s kind of like calling a spade a spade.

So anyway, I love fish balls. The textures, the taste, and with other else in the bowl, this would make my day. So I decided that I would make a very simple and classic fish ball bee hoon soup for lunch.

Recipe

Ingredients

10 Fish Balls (purchased from the wet market)
1 pc Bee Hoon (I usually use the two chilli brand)
A leaf of Chinese Cabbage
Light Soya Sauce

Method

1. Boil some water in a kettle and pour into the pot. Place the bee hoon (usually dried) and cook for a minute over a small fire.

2. Put the fish balls into the pot to cook. The test to see if they are cooked is to watch them all eventually float. Easy. Add the shredded Chinese cabbage and cook a minute longer and you can serve. Add soya sauce to taste.

Bon Appetit!

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Home cooked fish ball bee hoon soup

Batang Fish Porridge

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Batang Fish Porridge

Another comfort food for those that are in dire need of much comfort. Yes, fish porridge is definitely on my list of comfort foods. I dont usually do fish porridge the way my mum likes to cook it, but since I haven’t been feeling all that fantastic, I thought I should do it like how mum cooks it.

She loves to use bay-kah fish which I don’t really have at ntuc, so I guess I just have to make do with batang fish. Same same but slightly different. The texture of the meat is kind of like tuna in a way. Maybe one of these days I might experiment with tuna to make fish porridge.

Mum would skin off the fish, chop the meat into a paste and season it with light soya sauce and sesame seed oil. All the ingredients that makes it great. I don’t know what else or maybe I wasn’t really paying attention. So this is my version of my mum’s fish porridge.

Recipe

Ingredients

A cut of Batang Fish (usually the lower part is best)
Some Tong Chai (this is some kind of pickled vegetable that is for flavouring soups)
Light Soya Sauce
Sesame Seed Oil
Half a cup of Rice (this is for cooking porridge)

Method

1. De-skin the Batang Fish or remove as much meat as possible. The meat is then chopped aggressively as if to mince it.

2. Once it is suitably minced, add light soya sauce and sesame seed oil to marinate the fish paste.

3. Once the fish paste is ready, you can spoon dollops into the plain porridge and stir until it is cooked.

4. Cooking plain porridge is easy. Add rice to a pot and boil with water until the rice breaks down.

5. Add tong chai to flavour the porridge and you can eat.

Bon Appetit!

Sweet Potato Soup

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Sweet Potato Soup

Comfort foods are what we need when we really need comforting. It’s like the mother/wife replacement when they are not around you or if you are traveling on a long journey to somewhere far away.

One such comfort food would be the humble sweet potato soup eaten more like a dessert more than a meal. It’s the quintessential comfort food that most Singaporeans would know and if you were to smell it from a distance with its signature spicy gingery flavour, it ust oozes goodness and warm feelings of home.

It’s also just about the easiest recipe to make as well. Just wash and cut the sweet potatoes into bite sized cubes, add ginger, sugar and water and its ready to eat when it is softened.

Recipe

Ingredients

2 large pieces of Sweet Potatoes (for one person)
5 thin slices of Ginger
Sugar (level up to you)
Water (just enough to cover the sweet potatoes)

Method

1. Wash and cut sweet potatoes, of course peel the skin first. Cut into bite sized pieces. Easy to eat.

2. Cut 5 thin slices of ginger, any type will do. Add water to cover most of Sweet potato in the pot can already. Too much water is pointless.

3. Add Sugar to taste. Up to you. Once cook, and the test is to be able to smell the fragrance. Then serve.

Bon Appetit!

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Swee Bo sweet potato soup

Braised Pork Trotters

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Braised Pork Trotters

My favourite pork trotters in soya sauce. Finally found a recipe that I think works, but decided to cook it the way that I like to. Sorry the photo doesn’t do the dish justice. But I wanted to show that I took a short cut when preparing this dish.

In a nutshell, everything was thrown into the pot without marination. Reason is because this is a braised dish. Braising means you got to cook it for a reasonably amount of time and that means load everything essential into the pot and let the heat melt the gelatinous fat and bond everyone together.

In the end, it was a very nicely cooked pork trotters. Done the Ho Sim Lang way. It’s so easily done, anyone can do it also.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 whole foreleg of Pork (i’m sure you know I meant Pig)
5-6 tbsp Dark Soya Sauce (more if you like)
2 tbsp of Light Soya Sauce
2 tbsp of Oyster Sauce
5cm length of Cinnamon Stick
2 pcs Star Anise
5 pcs Cloves
2 tbsp Castor Sugar
2 tbsp Corn Flour
5 pcs of Dried Shitake Mushrooms
Half a bowl of Hakka Rice Wine
Water (enough to cover the meats)

Method

1. Place the foreleg into the pot. Drop the cinnamon stick, star anise and cloves in. Add the dark soya sauce, light soya sauce, oyster sauce and rice wine in. Add in hot boiling water and make sure the water cover the meats. Boil until water is bubbling. Do a taste test for saltiness. Meanwhile soak the Shitake mushrooms in hot water. Once soaked, cut off the stems and slice and continue soaking.

2. This is the part that is tricky. You want to taste the correct taste before you let the heat take over. If it is not salty enough, add more dark soya sauce. If it is not sweet enough add more castor sugar. The reason why this is crucial is because you are allowing the saltiness of the broth to braise the meats. So it has to be reasonably salty but not too salty. After your taste test is done, mix in the corn flour (mix with some water first) mixture. Add the soaked mushrooms.

3. Cover the lid. Turn the heat to low and go read a book. After about one hour and thirty minutes. It should be nicely done.

Bon Appetit!

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Braised Pork Trotters

Wagyu Steak in Anchovy Butter

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Wagyu Steak in Anchovy Butter

Dinner time has been mostly steam fish this boiled vegetable that. So for tonight’s dinner, I am making a very simple wagyu steak in my favourite anchovy butter sauce.

I came across a rather large wagyu steak on offer at Cold Storage and knew at once that this was going to be a very nice dinner. It was on specials and honestly I couldn’t tell if it was any different from the normal priced wagyu steaks. So I got myself a whole slab. Yum.

The problem with steaks of any kind is usually the preparation of the meat. Cooking time is essential if not critical to the success of the dinner. You can fry up all the premium ingredients to complement the main, but if the doneness of the steak fails, you would have also failed miserably.

For the vegetables that accompanied the steak, I had stir fry Japanese button mushrooms, whole garlic cloves and white button mushrooms with boiled cherry tomatoes and baby potatoes. But what makes this steak really special is the anchovy butter sauce. So simple, just mix the anchovy with the butter in the pan with rosemary herbs and you have a very light butter sauce that works very well with the meat.

Recipe

Ingredients

Main
700-800 grams Wagyu Steak (if you’re not living near a specialty butcher, you could opt to order online Wagyu Kobe Steaks)
Sea Salt
Black Pepper
1 tbsp Olive Oil

Anchovy butter sauce
A small can of Anchovy in Olive Oil
20 grams of Unsalted Butter
A sprig of Rosemary (herb)

Assortment of Vegetables
A pack of Japanese Button Mushrooms
A punnet of White Button Mushrooms
A punnet of Red Cherry Tomatoes
6-7 cloves of Garlic
6 pieces Baby Potatoes
Olive Oil
Black Pepper

Method

1. Boil the baby potatoes in a small pot for about 10 minutes or until a skewer can pierce through. Once done, remove the potatoes and blanch the tomatoes for about 30 seconds. Then remove and arrange vegetabkes on serving plate.

2. In a wok, stir fry the Japanese mushrooms and mildly crushed garlic cloves in 2 tbsp Olive oil for about 2-3 minutes. Quart the white button mushrooms and add the whole lot into the same wok. Continue stir fry. Do this for another 5 minutes. Mushrooms shoukd either sear or shrink down in size. This is common as it loses water content. Once done, dish onto serving plates.

3. Sprinkle the steaks with sea salt and black pepper. In another pan, heat olive oil until smoking, then reduce heat to low. Place the steak into the pan and start pan-searing. 3 minutes on the first side and then another 2 minutes on the other side. Check doneness for medium rare. The meat centre should be a rose pink. If it is a dark red, then maybe you have to cook it a little longer.

The reason why I chose low heat as opposed to high heat is because I don’t want to over-cook the steak. So you have to time the steak strictly. Cut the middle to check for desired doneness. As the wagyu steak is very fatty, it is better to cook over low heat so that the fats will be tender. Once cooked to desired doneness, place it on serving plate.

4. In the same frying pan with the steak infused oil, add the butter and two fillets of anchovies. Break the anchovies and mash it into the butter. Throw in a sprig of Rosemary leaves. Cook until the sauce bubbles and spoon it into the steak. That’s it!

Pair it with a Cabernet Sauvignon or a spicy Shiraz.

Bon Appetit!

Milk-Fed Dutch Veal Chop

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Milk-Fed Dutch Veal Chop

It was my birthday the other day. Yup! Your uncle is one year older. But my name’s not bob. Anyway, as per our family custom if you could call it that, my wife brought me out for a date. It’s been a white since our last date, so I am pretty stoked.

We went for a really nice breakfast at my favourite breakfast place. And then we caught a movie, “The Avengers – Age of Ultron“. Verdict? Three letters. CMI. It was kind of disappointing for me.

The interesting thing was while we were on our way there, someone tapped me on the shoulders and said “Happy Birthday!“. It was a nice surprise and gesture. I asked my friend where he was off to and he hurriedly said “Luke’s Oyster blah and Chop House” and that he was working there. In my heart I was like “Wow“. And before we knew it, he disappeared into the shopping mall.

So I turned to my wife and suggested that we went to that place for lunch and guess what?! She had already pre-booked Luke’s Oyster Bar and Chop House for my surprise birthday lunch. You can imagine the grin on my face and I almost did a dance where I was standing.

Interestingly the entrance to the restaurant was hidden and had looked like the wall of the ladies department store at Robinsons, Hereen. It was nondescript to say the least and nobody would have guessed that there was a restaurant tucked away.

We ordered a whole bunch of stuff which I don’t care to mention, but my birthday main course worked the magic for me. It was nicely cooked to a medium rare. The meat was a bright pink throughout, the fat attached at the end was delicious and complemented the chop. Tender, succulent, delicious. I literally ran out of words in my mind as I chow down the chop, slice by slice.

The anchovy marmite butter was simply genius. There was no trace of it, but it smothered the entire veal chop and basically saturated and set the tone from the first cut. Even the Merlot that I had paled in comparison and in my opinion didn’t match up to the meat. A Shiraz would have been nice, but with another movie to attend to, I wasn’t about to down an entire bottle over lunch.

Simple, yet perfectly done. I would come again, just for the veal chop. I would bear with everything else just to chow down that chop. Of course we waved to my friend, but we didn’t want to disturb him. And I guess he didn’t want to disturb us. A waitress stood nearby and attended to our meals. Yes it was that kind of a place.

Stunned Like Vegetable

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Stunned Like Vegetable

I went about my usual shopping today at the wet market for the week’s grocery and planning new and interesting meals for my family. I gotta say this, cooking helps bond the family together. If you don’t believe me, try cooking all your meals at home and have everyone eating together at the same time. Powerful man.

But what is more power is this Kacang Petai that I got from the vegetable seller. They all look so innocently polished and refined, and such a  beautiful greenish hue, but oh my, the vegetable has an awful stench of fresh vomit on pavement. Stink beans as some people call it, and when I had a whiff of it, my stomach tied itself into a knot. As Chen Tian Wen would probably say Stunned Like Vegetable. Except perhaps in my case, I so stunned by vegetable.

Anyway, from what I read, the only way to cook this vegetable is to mix it with an equally convulsive ingredient, the Belacan. That old stinky fermented dried paste of the carcasses of rotting sea-creatures, dried in sun and congealed into blocks of smelly goodness. The two ingredients coming together officially makes it a double stunning to awaken the senses.

Add a little Assam, dried shrimps (hae bi) and a few tubes of chilli padi, this rather unique dish will take shape and become nothing short of delicious. I have had it at the Makchik’s Nasi Padang stall at the market, and it is just awesome. Of course, my version is more flavourful, I cooking for my family, not cook to sell.

Recipe

Ingredients

300 grams of Kacang Petai
100 grams of Dried Shrimps
5-6 tubes of Chilli Padi
2-3 cm of Belacan
4-5 Glass Prawns (fresh from the wet market)
A little Assam or Tamarind
Sea Salt
Olive Oil

Method

1. Soak the petai in hot water, so that it won’t be so stinky (I doubt it removes any stink). Process the dried shrimps, chilli padi and belacan in a food chopper to combine the ingredients into a paste.

2. Stir fry the paste in 2 tbsp of oil until fragrant (and pungent). Add some salt if you like, but the hae bi should be quite salty already. Once cooked reserved the paste one side.

3. Add the prawns (and more oil if needed) and fry until the prawns all turn into a “C” shape. Then reserved the prawns aside.

4. Now fry the petai beans in the wok with the Belacan paste. Then add the rest of the ingredients together for a good combine. Add a little water into the Tamarind, and then add the strained juice of Assam into the wok and continue frying until the beans are relatively cooked but still firmed.

5. Serve with steam rice.

Bon Appetit!

Fish Soup

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Fish Soup

My wife and I went to Putien restaurant for lunch the other day and we ordered their Fish Soup, simply because we love soup. It was then that I noticed that they had a very interesting take on the soup. They used a Yellow Croaker for the broth, which resulted in a light and mildly flavoured fish soup. Personally I thought it was so-so only.

It was oily, gingery but delicious, just that the fish flavour could be a little stronger and the fish itself could be a little tastier. My lightning fast taste-buds quickly deciphered the soup and memorized the ingredients list and reverse engineered the entire cooking process in my mind. So I decided to cook my version of that fish soup, but using my favourite Garoupa fish head. Sure nice one.

I stir fried the ginger slices and a few cloves of garlic. Then fried the fish head without any seasoning or salt. Just in the same oil. In another pot, I was boiling a natural chicken stock. Kind of got tired of the pre-made chicken stocko as I felt it was too salty. Added a few essential ingredients like wolfberries, Chinese scallops and dried oysters. Done.

The final product was a perfect fish soup. The flesh of the Red Garoupa was flavourful and tender, better in taste than the flesh of the Yellow Croaker.

Recipe

Ingredients

2 carcass of Chicken Bones (for making stock)
1 whole Red Garoupa fish head (small)
10 thin slices of Ginger
5 cloves of Garlic
Handful of Wolfberries
5 number of Chinese Scallops
3 number of Dried Oysters
Olive Oil
Sea Salt

Optional

10 slices of Yam (pre-packed yam will do)
4 pieces of Tau Pok (aka dried bean curd puffs)

Method

1. Boil the chicken stock using the chicken bones. Skim off the fat and dried blood as you boil. Soak the scallops and oysters in hot water for about 10 minutes.

2. Fry the ginger slices in the oil until it starts to brown a little. Then take it out. Now fry the garlic whole (not minced) and then take it out when it browns.

3. Next fry up the fish in the same oil. Add a little more oil if need be. Once the fish starts to brown a little add the pre-fried ingredients of ginger and garlic back into the wok. Add the soaked scallops, soaked oysters and also the wolfberries.

4. Now you can ladle the natural chicken stock into the wok and continue to cook the fish soup over a slow simmer. Do this for about 10-15 minutes. Seafood cooks rather quickly especially fish. It is kind of like having steam boat. Add salt to taste.

5. If you want to add tau pok and yam slices, you may do so, and it will be perfect. But if not, it will still taste great!

Bon Appetit!

Banana Nut Crunch

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Banana Nut Crunch

I really miss my days in Australia and those breakfast mornings of simple cornflakes, dried fruit and full cream milk. Sometimes we just need to get back to the basics of simple breakfast.

I particularly like mine with fresh fruits like peaches, apricots and banana. Personally I like Banana Nut Crunch with its crunchy textures and banana flavoured signatures. I reckon it is by far one of the nicer breakfast cornflakes around.

So today I decided to have a simple breakfast. It was also just nice that we got kek leng jio (aka Indian Banana 印度香蕉) and it works beautifully with the banana nut cornflakes. A healthy breakfast full of fibre.

Saveur The Tenderloin

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Saveur The Tenderloin

The Tenderloin steak from Saveur, is really a welcome surprise. We ordered a medium doneness to satisfy our intense craving for beef steak, and it was delivered to a tender perfection. Impressive.

Yum, and yes, we love it. It had cost us about $25 for 150 grams. For the decent quality and the fact that they delivered what we wanted, it was not expensive. Tucked away at level one of Far East Plaza, no one would have thought that an outlet could be found here.

So what is nice at Saveur? I guess just about everything is nice. I had the duck confit and boeuf bourguignon the last time around and it didn’t disappoint. Prices are mid-range and quality is value for money especially considering that it is like casual fine dining.

Looking forward to going back for another dinner with my wife. Maybe for her birthday.

Chicken Macaroni

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Chicken Macaroni

The foods of champions, the humble Chicken Macaroni has become the super-foods that parents love to give their kids. More so because it is so easy to prepare. Just boil the pasta, add boiled chicken and salt and you can eat.

Of course it is only true for the pure at heart. However in my less than perfect world, my Chicken Macaroni has to be done the hard way. It has to have all the necessary ingredients to make this dish truly special.

Why? You might ask. Well, why not? I am cooking for my family wat. So it has to be nothing short of special.

Recipe

Ingredients

250 grams of Dried Macaroni (for two servings, I use Barilla Elbows, they are kind of same same.)
2 pieces of de-boned Chicken Thighs
4 carcass of Chicken Bones (for making stock)
Handful of Dried Chinese Scallops
A few Dried Oysters
5-6 whole Garlic Cloves
Sea Salt
Black Pepper
Evaporated Milk

Method

1. Boil a kettle of water (about 1.7litres). Add to the pot with the carcasses of Chicken Bones to boil for stock. Skim the scum and excess oil off the surface of the broth.

2. After about 20 minutes boiling at high heat, remove and discard the chicken bones. Add the scallops and oysters to flavour the soup. Fry and sear the garlic cloves in a pan before also adding into the broth to cook. You may reduce the fire to a slow simmer. Now boil another kettle of water. This is for cooking the macaroni.

3. Cook the macaroni in another pot until soften (boil pass al dente). This is so that your kids can eat as well.

4. Marinate the boneless chicken thighs with salt and black pepper. Leave aside for at least ten minutes. Once it is ready, fry the chicken with a little oil in a frying pan, 3 minutes on each side. After searing the sides, remove and slice into thin pieces.

5. Then boil the sliced chicken pieces in the broth by using the slotted ladle technique to further cook the chicken pieces. Once cooked, place in individual serving bowls.

6. Check that the pasta is cooked beyond al dente by doing a taste test. It should be reasonably softened. Once ready ladle the cooked macaroni into the bowls with the boiled chicken pieces.

7. Add salt and a little evaporated milk to thicken the broth. Cook a while longer and you can ladle the chicken broth to the Macaroni. Serve hot.

Bon Appetit!

Strawberry Hearts

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Strawberry Hearts

This is my first attempt at making Strawberry Hearts. I have always wanted to make this dessert for the longest time but somehow never got down to it.

I guess it is partly due to the fact that baking is more tedious than cooking. The amount of layering required for this recipe is quite insane, and you have to get each step correct. You can taste your way to perfection for cooking but with baking (or no bake) recipes, you can’t make any mistakes. Each misstep can lead to undesired outcomes.

So someone posted on Singapore Baking Facebook that they made their own Strawberry Hearts. And then someone else posted another recipe and from the looks of it, it is rather authentic. Immediately I knew I had to try it. So I went about buying all the ingredients, and alas, the supermarket near my place had sold out on gelatin. Incredible.

That’s like the stabilizing factor in the no-bake cake industry. I was so close, having already gotten the bulk of the ingredients in another earlier purchase. Then I still vaguely remember having already purchased gelatin. After returning home I realized it had already expired and my wife disposed of it.

So this is my gelatin-less version of the Strawberry Hearts.

Recipe

Ingredients

Biscuit base

200 grams of Digestive Biscuits (the other recipe started 300 grams, but I felt it was too thick)
100 grams Unsalted Butter (best to use unsalted butter as you won’t want your biscuit base to taste too salty)

Cream Cheese Layer

2 x 250 grams Philadelphia Cream Cheese (you can buy bigger blocks from Phoon Huat)
2/3 cups Castor Sugar
1 tsp Vanilla Essence
1 1/2 tbsp Gelatin Powder (I substituted magnolia full cream milk instead, 1/4 cup)
1 1/4 cup of Boiling Water (didn’t use water but used milk)

Jelly Layer

160 grams of Strawberry Tortelly Jelly Powder

Lastly – 1 punnet of Strawberries (make sure you check the sizes are similar, korean strawberries are the best)

Method

(I gleaned off the recipe from Ms Karen Lim aka “Bing” ‘s recipe and adapted it to what I think would work for me)

1. Bing’s recipe was done on a glass pan or casserole dish. I think I have that same glass dish as well, also about the same size. Pretty standard. But the 300 grams of digestive was a little too much. So if I were to do it again, I would reduce to 200 grams (as indicated above) and also reduce the butter correspondingly from her 150 grams to 100 grams.

2. I crushed the biscuits in a Kenwood Food Processor, for this, you could try the biscuits in a ziplock bag and whack it with a rolling pin approach, but seriously, it is not the same. Bing’s biscuit crushing appliance is also a tad too small. You want to crush the biscuits until they are fine grains. Follow her photos and recipe process, but take into consideration my pointers here.

3. Gelatin is an absolute must. You can’t just pretend that it is not there. I pretended of course (read the story above as to why I didn’t have gelatin in my bakery warchest) and used Magnolia Full Cream Milk to fake the presence of Gelatin. I am taking this calculated risk because I want to create liquid but not make it too solvent (get it?!). So I added a 1/4 cup of Milk to reduce the density of the cheese mixture but yet not too much so that it still retains structure (also I don’t quite like the taste of gelatin in my cakes). My plan worked. Of course if you are still not sure what I am doing, follow Bing’s recipe with the gelatin, cannot go wrong.

4. Once the biscuit is set, I did the fork-poke-holes in biscuit crust thing as what Bing suggested. I think it is to allow the cheese mixture to fill into the tiny holes so that they can retain the structure. In my case it was kind of redundant because my cream cheese mixture was like molten lava texture. There was very little liquid to begin with.

5. I bought Driscoll’s (US) Strawberries, which upon hindsight was a bit of a mistake. These US strawberry farmers usually like to pack in all different sizes. The Korean guys are better in that they pack the same sizes. Korean strawberries are pretty to look at (like korean pop groups) and they are perfect if you want your strawberry hearts to look cookie cutter.

6. I got Philadelphia Cream Cheese which was made in Australia. Of course if you can find the ones produced in the US, then that is better. I find the Australian versions not as nice. But limited choice so bo pian. You may buy the bigger slabs from places like Phoon Huat but the quality would again differ.

7. I used Tortelly Jelly because I couldn’t find the brand of jelly that Bing used, then after reading her blog, realised that she lives in New Zealand (haha!!). So naturally I need to find my substitute here. It’s not the best, Konnyaku would have been better. 160 grams of jelly was just nice for what I did, so that’s a keeper.

8. Her note about setting the cream cheese with the strawberries is not without reason. I did my fake-gelatin method and set it for 3 hours only before scooping in the liquid strawberry jelly mixture. Even then the bits of cheese mixture floated (a bit only, cannot really see), so you might need to set it at least 4 hours or longer. Thankfully none of the strawberries floated, so that was good.

9. Once the strawberry hearts were set overnight, I used a sharp knife to cut the pieces out. My gosh, they are huge slabs, measuring about 4cm by 5cm. I am now wondering how in the world the jelly hearts business people manage to create their so thinly. Theirs is truly beautiful. Mine, was just not pretty at all.

10. The only saving grace was that the strawberry hearts tasted fantastic. Really nice. I would definitely do it again, but with gelatin and maybe with 3 tsp of Lemon Juice.

Bon Appetit!

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Setting the cream cheese

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Strawberry Hearts encased in jelly.

Salted Soya Beans and Ginger

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Salted Soya Beans and Ginger

I have been focusing a lot on soups and fish but little is written on the many sauces that I would make to go along with the dishes. Sometimes I would make chilli dipping sauce and other times it would be something like this.

Salted Soya Beans (or tau chiun) with Ginger is often the accompanying sauce that goes with Steamed White Stomach Fish or also known as Rabbit Fish. It’s a very Teochew way of eating steamed fish. There is usually no marination for the fish but instead a dipping sauce is served alongside.

To increase confluence of flavour, I would scoop some fish stock (after steaming) and add into the sauce for more power.

Recipe

Ingredients

2 inches of Ginger
2 tsp of Salted Soya Beans
1 tsp Light Soya Sauce
1 small Calanmansi Lime

Method

1. Chop the ginger into cubes. Put into condiment saucer. Add the soya beans and soya sauce and a squish of lime juice.

Bon Appetit!

Pumpkin Tomato Soup

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Pumpkin Tomato Soup

Interestingly the vegetables and meat arranged in that manner kind of looks cheesy and seem to resemble the letters “COI”, which seem also to mean conflict of interest. Honestly, I don’t see how there could be any conflict of interest here. Conflict of Ingredients maybe? Again it is not likely either because this soup tasted absolutely gorgeous.

But one thing though, the pumpkin after 12 hours of thermal cooker magic kind of makes it mushy and not the texture that I wanted. I was a tad disappointed. The taste of the soup on the other hand was fantastic and that was all that matters. Taste wise, it was a home-run. So that’s two thumbs up. Hurray.

Recipe

Ingredients

A small slice of Pumpkin (just the regular type will do)
A large Tomato (cut into quarts)
250 grams of Pork Ribs
Salt

Method

1. Boil a kettle of water. Slice the pumpkin into chunks. Quart the tomato. Place the pork ribs into the pot. Dump the prepared ingredients into the pot. Pour the hot water into the pot, add a little salt and boil for about 20 minutes on high heat before placing the pot into the thermal cooker. Allow at least 12 hours to cook the soup.

Bon Appetit!

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Pumpkin Chunks

Garlic Tomato Prawns

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Garlic Tomato Prawns

This is my mother-in-law’s recipe. As much as you might wonder if the above photo resemble some kind of fossilized crustacean, I assure you, it is not. Those prawns were fresh. My picture taking skills on the other hand leaves much to be desired.

I asked my mother-in-law how she cooked it one day and she said a whole load of ingredients which sounded like a whole load of ingredients. Very hard to follow. So I decided that I would simplify her recipe to just three ingredients.

Make it easy for you and me. Prawns, garlic and good old tomato sauce. Easy. Best part is, it still tastes fantastic.

Recipe

Ingredients

6 medium sized Glass Prawns
Lots of Garlic (rough chop)
3-4 tbsp of Tomato Sauce
Olive Oil

Method

1. Heat oil in wok. Throw the prepared garlic pieces in to fry until fragrant. Then throw the prawns in. Fry until they form a “C-shape”. Then add tomato sauce. Continue frying, add a little bit of water. Let it simmer a minute and it’s done.

Bon Appetit!

Stir Fry Belacan Wing Beans

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Stir Fry Belacan Wing Beans

My wife bought this odd looking vegetable the other day and told me to work the magic. Of course everyone knows there is no such thing as magic, at least not in my kitchen that is.

Nevertheless, I took a long hard look at this vegetable otherwise known as “Wing Beans” or as they call it in Malay, “Kacang Botol“. It is a weird looking vegetable indeed with its “C-shaped” body if you were to slice it through. I remember having it once at some coffeeshop zi char stall and it was presented to us in an intense sambal belacan sauce. I thought that it was delicious.

So what better way to cook this dish than to do it in sambal belacan. My twist is to add a few glass prawns (my favourite prawns) and it would be perfect.

Recipe

Ingredients

6 medium sized Glass Prawns
300 grams of Wing Beans
Handful of Dried Shrimps (hae bi)
1 piece of Red Chilli (chopped finely)
3-4 grams of Belacan
Light Soya Sauce
Olive Oil

Method

1. Wash and slice the wing beans into 1 cm length pieces. Mix the belacan, dried shrimps and finely chopped chilli into a blender and blend the ingredients into a paste. At this point, it would be good to ventilate the kitchen.

2. Wash and prepare the glass prawns, heat oil in the wok and then fry the prawns until they curl into a “C-shaped” position. This means the are cooked. Reserve the prawns aside.

3. Now heat another batch of oil in the wok, throw the belacan paste into the wok and stir fry until fragrant. Then add a little more oil and throw the prepared wing beans into the wok and give it a good stir. Continue frying until the colour of the vegetable turns a dark green. Then add the prawns and continue stirring. Continue frying for another five minutes and it is ready to be served.

Bon Appetit!

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Wing Bean aka Kacang Botol

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Belacan, finely chopped chilli, dried shrimps

Old Cucumber Melon Soup

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Old Cucumber Melon Soup

The old Cucumber Melon can readily be found almost everywhere and is available at your local wet market grocer or NTUC supermarkets. But for some reason, I have resisted cooking it until now.

Don’t get me wrong, I love this traditional soup especially at the Chinese restaurants and sometimes at the food courts. But like the Burdock Soup 牛蒡汤, I have only recently started cooking this melon soup.

Simple, nutritious and delicious. If I can do it, anyone can.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 medium size Old Cucumber Melon
10 pieces Dried Red Dates
5 pieces Dried Scallops
2 pieces Dried Octopus
250 grams Pork Ribs
Salt

Method

1. Cut the old Cucumber in half and gorge out the seeds with a spoon. Then chop into chunks. Place the pork ribs, red dates, scallops, octopus and the prepared melon into the pot. Add a little salt. Pour in a kettle of boiling water into the pot.

2. Boil for at least 20 minutes. Then place the pot in the thermal cooker and re-heat after 12 hours when you are back from work.

Bon Appetit!

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Old Cucumber Melon

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Delicious Old Cucumber Melon Soup

Pork Belly in Soya Sauce

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Pork Belly in Soya Sauce

I am making a very simple pork belly in soya sauce. This dish is great for breakfast or if you wanna have it with buns and lots of Chinese Parsley. Plus I bought a different brand and type of soya sauce recently and this is the thick type, compared to the more diluted one. I wanted to try out and see if this works as well.

Some of you may remember that I made something quite similar before. That was the Braised Pork Belly in Soya Sauce. Maybe you might ask how different is this version compared to that one. The difference is largely in the soya sauce. I am also adding galangal in this version, so I think it will have a slightly different taste to it.

I left out the mushrooms, so it would be interesting to try out this plain version. Also I had already pre-cooked the pork belly when I prepared my Boiled Pork Belly for the soup stock. So cooking time is merely to heat it up and it is great for quick meals if you are short for time.

Recipe

Ingredients

200 grams of Pork Belly (cut in chunks, pre-cooked)
2 tbsp of Dark Soya Sauce
1 Cinnamon stick (about 5cm)
3-4 cm Galangal (blue ginger)

Method

1. Place the pork belly (usually it is frozen) into the claypot. Add the soya sauce, cinnamon stick and galangal. For the blue ginger, you can either slice or bruise it.

2. Add a one and half cups of water and boil at low heat for about 45 minutes. Keep stirring to prevent the sauce from burning. Once done, garnish with Chinese Parsley if you like.

Bon Appetit!

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Lotus Peanut and Pork Ribs Soup

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Lotus Peanut and Pork Ribs Soup

I have always wanted to make this soup, but have until now been unable to do so for one reason or another. This was largely due to the fact that I was always forgetting to buy that one crucial ingredient – peanuts.

Now that I have gotten over that hurdle. I can finally make this Lotus Peanut and Pork Ribs Soup. Actually I believe I have made this soup once before but the peanuts didn’t cook as well as I would have liked. But that could also be because I was boiling the soup as opposed to cooking it in a 12 hour thermal cooking process. Also, I didn’t pre-soak the peanuts as most tradition home cooks would advise.

So I did it my way, and to be honest, the experts are right. You really need to pre-soak the peanuts overnight. Oh well, at least I managed to get a rather soft peanut, but not soft enough. Plus I kept it in the thermal cooker for more than 12 hours. Didn’t know peanuts are so resilient.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 long tube Lotus Root (they say the lotus root should be covered in mud, otherwise not so good quality)
A bowl of Peanuts (better to pre-soak overnight, I tried not soaking and failed, so please soak)
1-2 pieces of Dried Octopus
250 grams of Pork Ribs
Salt

Method

1. Boil a kettle of water. Place frozen pork ribs into pot. Throw the pre-soaked peanuts into the pot. Throw the dried octopus into the pot also. Wash the lotus root, shave off the skin, then slice the tubular root into beautiful shapes. After that throw into the pot. Add a pinch of salt to taste. Add boiling hot water. Boil for 20 minutes. After that, place in thermal cooker for 12 hours and let the magic happen.

Bon Appetit!

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Sliced Lotus Root

Carrot Corn Tomato Mushroom Soup

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Carrot Corn Tomato Mushroom Soup

I tend to use only two types of meats for my soup base. Either pork ribs from Indonesia or carcass of chicken. Both yields a very lovely soup with my preference leaning more towards a pork base flavoured soup. But I tend to leave out the meats that flavours the soup when naming them because it just gets too wordy. Don’t worry, I will still make mention of them in the ingredient listing.

So today’s soup puts a twist to the ever popular ABC soup. The confinement recipe is great for mummies who are breastfeeding, somehow what you eat is what baby will grow to love when they grow up. I am adding dried shitake mushrooms into the soup today and I know that it will taste absolutely fantastic.

Just an update on the soup that I was trying out, the Carrot Radish Bamboo Burdock Soup. Interestingly the soup was suitably muted, which came as a surprise as I was sure the taste of the soup would have a strong radish or burdock flavour. Instead there was no outstanding ingredient that stood out. It tasted very nice.

Recipe

Ingredients

250 grams of Pork Ribs
1 medium sized Carrot
1 ear of Corn
1 large Tomato
4-5 pieces Dried Shitake Mushrooms
Salt

Method

1. Boil a kettle of water. Peel and chop the carrot into chunks. Chop the corn into 8 pieces. Quart the tomato. Soak the mushrooms and then slice them. Place the frozen pork ribs into the pot. Then add the rest of the prepared ingredients into the pot.

2. Once water is boiled, add into the pot. Add salt to taste. Boil at high heat for 20 minutes.

3. After boiling, place the pot into the thermal cooker and come back 12 hours later to have it for dinner.

Bon Appetit!

Teochew Steamed Pomfret

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Teochew Steamed Pomfret

The most basic recipe in my arsenal of home cooked recipes, the white pomfret steamed in Teochew style. You may also wish to check out my other recipe Teochew Steamed Garoupa if you prefer another type.

The White Pomfret has accompanied our family feasts for many years now, I have been eating this fish since my childhood, steamed to perfection this way. In fact it is one of the few recipes that I used since starting my gastronomic journey.

This recipe is simple and basic. Dried shitake mushrooms, tomatoes, preserved salted vegetables (aka kiam chye), preserved salted plums and ginger. Garnished with Chinese parsley, and it is a perfect dish. I particularly like using this fish for Teochew style steaming  because the flesh is very succulent and sweet when cooked perfectly.

Recipe

Ingredients

A medium sized White Pomfret (maybe about 800-900 grams)
50-60 grams of Kiam Chye (shredded thinly)
2 medium sized Tomatoes (quartered)
5 pieces Dried Shitake Mushrooms (soaked and sliced)
2 pieces of Preserved Salted Plums
A few slices of Ginger
3 stalks of Chinese Parsley

Method

1. Wash and gut the pomfret. Or you can get the Fishmonger to help you gut the fish. Of course if you want to keep the fish fresh till the day you’re gonna eat it, it is recommended to keep the guts intact.

2. Place one crushed salted plum in the gut of the fish. Also place a few slices of Ginger in the stomach of the fish as well. This helps rid the stomach of the fish of any smells or bitter taste.

3. Soak the mushrooms in hot water and snip off the stems, then slice them. Continue to soak after slicing. Cut the tomatoes into quarters. As for the kiam chye, shred them thinly.

4. Sprinkle the shredded kiam chye on the centre of the plate. Then lay the pomfret on top of the salted vegetables. Surround the fish with the tomatoes and sliced mushrooms. Place the other crushed salted plum on the plate.

5. Steam the pomfret a good 20 minutes at high heat. Once it is done, garnish with chopped parsley. Allow the heat to wilt the parsley a little before serving. Shiok!

Bon Appetit!

Teochew Steamed Garoupa

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Teochew Steamed Garoupa

The Garoupa is undoubtedly one of the best fish to be prepared in the Teochew style. The flesh when well steamed and cooked would be firm and flaky, sweet and succulent. It is truly a fish in a class of its own.

It’s one of my favourite fish for my Claypot Fish Head recipe where I would try to get the red variety of the fish. Delicious. There was no way of going back to any other variant of fish after tasting the Garoupa prepared in the claypot fish head style.

Tonight’s dinner is a presentation of this fish in classic Teochew style. Steamed with tomatoes, kiam chye, dried Shitake mushrooms and preserved salted plums. A few slices of Ginger to remove any awkward bitterness in the stomah, and the dish would be complete and ready.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 medium size Garoupa fish
20-30 grams of Kiam Chye (sliced)
5 pieces of Dried Shitake Mushrooms
2 medium size Tomatoes
2 pieces of Preserved Salted Plums
2 inches of Ginger
2 stalks of Spring Onions

Method

1. Defrost the fish (assuming that you are like me, storing the marketing of the week in the freezer). Meanwhile, slice the kiam chye (aka preserved salted vegetables) and quart the tomatoes. Decorate the metal plate (I use the metal plate for steaming all my fishes) with the prepared ingredients.

2. Soak the dried mushrooms in hot boiling water until softened. Then slice into large chunks. Also decorate the plate, surrounding the fish with the mushrooms. Slice a few pieces of ginger and stuff it into the stomach of the fish. This helps to rid the fish of any bitterness.

3. Place a preserved plum into the stomach cavity of the fish and crush another to be placed on the plate. This helps to flavour the fish as well as the fish stock that is expressed from the fish during steaming.

4. Steam the fish for at least 20 minutes at high heat. Garnish with spring onions if you like. Serve hot.

Bon Appetit!

Carrot Radish Bamboo Burdock Soup

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Carrot Radish Bamboo Burdock Soup

There are times when clarity is no longer there, and we are now into unchartered waters. I looked into my fridge and the slew of ingredients that I bought over the weekend, and for the life of me, I couldn’t recall the recipe that someone suggested for me to do.

That problem could be compounded by the fact that information fly at us all the time, in simultaneous fashion, and unstoppable. To the point that if we heard something interesting, and if we didn’t make a special effort to note it down, then it is likely to be lost in the wasteland of forgotten words.

I vaguely remember it, and it goes something like, this plus this plus that and that. Bah! I can’t remember. Forget it.

So today, I am making carrot radish bamboo burdock soup. Making it in the way that I always like to do, and that is to keep it simple.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 medium Carrot
1 medium White Radish
1 packet of fresh Bamboo
80-90 cm length of Burdock Root
250 grams Pork Ribs
Sea Salt

Method

1. Peel, shave the carrot, the radish and the burdock. If you want, you may soak the burdock first. Otherwise throw the prepared ingredients into the pot. By this time the frozen pork ribs would already be in place and waiting (with open arms and open palms).

2. Slice the bamboo, not too small slices, you don’t want the bamboo to “disappear”. Again once it is ready, just throw them into the pot. Add two pinches of salt and add a boiling kettle of water. Turn heat high and boil furiously for at least 20 minutes. After that is done, place the pot into the thermal cooker and allow time and heat to work the romance. Come back 12 hours later, and it’s ready.

Bon Appetit!

Stir Fry Mushrooms

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Stir Fry Mushrooms

My wife bought three types of mushrooms the other day and wanted me to fry them up as a dish. My lightning quick mind immediately thought of the style and how I would cook it. We love mushrooms, there is really nothing that we love eating more than the mysterious fungi.

The style that I would usually cook these mushrooms would be to roast them with rosemary herbs, olive oil and sea salt. Yum! But I also wanted to do a simple stir fry and see where the rabbit trail of cooking risk rewards would lead me. I wanted to see if it would taste just as fantastic if they were cooked in a Chinese uncle style. Like a charred-kway-teow uncle as he rocks his wok and flog the living daylights out of the kway teow in the pan with his magic stick.

For this dish, I am trying out the Szechuan Mala style. I have come to love the black beans used in frying this dish. So I thought I would also try it, but using the usual black beans that I always use when I make my Stir Fry Beef and Bitter Gourd. The end result was only so-so.

I think the problem could be the lack of a proper wok and big fire that is usually needed when cooking Szechuan Mala. Sigh, so sad for us home cooks with conventional equipment. Still keen to learn how I did it (and do it better)? Read on.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 packet of King Mushrooms
1 packet of Shitake Mushrooms
1 packet of White Button Mushrooms
3 tsp of preserved Black Beans
Olive Oil

Method

1. Slice and cut up the mushrooms. Add oil into frying pan, throw all the mushrooms into the pan, add the black beans. Turn up the heat and fry until the mushrooms are softened and shrunk. You generally want to sear them so that the fragrance of the black beans are infused. Make the fire as big as possible. Once fragrant, serve.

Bon Appetit!

Seafood Spaghetti in Tomato Sauce

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Seafood Spaghetti in Tomato Sauce

A quick and dirty recipe that I love to use whenever I am short of time to cook, is none other than spaghetti. There are so many permutation of recipes that I could think of with just so few ingredients. It is the technique that is most important when cooking pasta, not so much the choice of ingredients. Of course, if you have fresh ingredients, then that makes for an even better pasta experience.

I usually do this lovely Italian styled recipe with a little Singaporean twist to it. It is not al dente but you could make it that if you wanted to. I cook for my family, and that means my toddler needs to be able to eat it and enjoy it. So I do the Singaporean thing which is to make the pasta softer than usual, and very soupy with lots of sauce. You may not like my style of pasta. But my family loves it and that’s all that matters.

So I got home really late this evening, and it didn’t help that the taxi driver tried to be a know-it-all race car driver. He was speeding, taking sharp turns and slamming the brakes all throughout the journey back. By the time I got back, I was near exhausted and almost collapsed. It was really tough.

Plus I promised the family that I would make the most fantabulous pasta in the world. But I was really zoned out and feeling like crap. It doesn’t help that I have motion sickness and that basically worsened my dizziness. It took me longer than usual to recover this time around, but when I managed to overcome the sickness, I jumped straight into the kitchen.

I like my pasta in a certain way, so this recipe had a moderate difficulty rating as compared to my even quicker and dirtier soups that I make every morning. So if you’re ready, let’s get down to it.

 

Recipe

Ingredients

half a packet of Barilla brand Spaghetti (cooks in about 8 minutes al dente, but I usually cook them in about 11 minutes)

8 large Prawns (these are slightly greenish in colour)

8 large Scallops (defrosted)

a can of Narcissus Button Mushrooms (small can will do)

a can of Hunt’s Whole Tomato Sauce

a bottle of Leggos’ Tomato Paste (you can use any brand of sauce or paste, it doesn’t really matter)

Salted Butter

Olive Oil

Sea Salt

Black Pepper

 

Method

1. Firstly boil the pasta in a pot of water with a dash of olive oil and a pinch of sea salt. Boil for about 11 minutes (or longer if you are cooking for kids). After cooking, drain and add some olive oil to prevent it from becoming dry and clumpy. You may wish to douse it in ice cold water to stop the cooking so that the noodles are still firm.

2. Then add butter into the frying pan, with a little olive oil and sauté the button mushrooms. Add a little black pepper and sea salt. Stir fry until the mushrooms sear and shrink down in size. Then add the prawns to cook together with the mushrooms. Keep the heat moderate, and when the prawns start to curl up into the shape of a letter “C”, that is the sign that the prawns are “cooked”. If you don’t watch over this process carefully, what will happen is the prawns will continue curling and will eventually form an “O” shape. That basically means the prawns are now “Overcooked”. Simple tip.

3. Reserve the prawns and mushrooms into their individual plates. Now to cook the scallops. Add some butter, and olive oil to a new pan (if need be, wash the pan that you’re using) and turn the heat to a moderate level. Stir fry the scallops and also allow them to sear on both sides. You want to add a little salt so that they will taste a little better. Now with the scallops, it can be a little tricky, if you fry too long, it dries up too quickly. If you don’t cook it well enough, it may not taste as fantastic. This one requires some skill, and there are not many visible cues like “C” or “O” to help you along. So I will say – use the force.

4. After the scallops are done, place them in their plates and you can now add the pasta into the pan. By now they would be a little dry, and so you would need some water. You may add whatever water that you reserve before pouring out the pot (that you cooked the pasta in). Now the part that I like the most, preparing the tomato sauce.

5.  I use a combination of tomato paste and tomato sauce (I don’t mean Maggi Tomato Sauce, but the real tomato sauce with real tomatoes in the can). Pour the sauce into the pasta, and add two tablespoons of tomato paste and stir. Add a little salt and black pepper and continue to cook. Break up the whole tomatoes and combine the paste into the sauce. Mix well.

6. Once it is ready, using a pair of food tongs, serve the pasta onto the plates with the rest of the ingredients. Typically I wouldn’t cook it this way, but it is my quick and dirty recipe. I usually would use a lot of garlic in my cooking, but I used up all my garlic making the Bak Kut Teh yesterday. Sprinkle a little thyme or basil leaves if you have them. Delicious.

Bon Appetit!

Scallops and Asparagus

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Scallops and Asparagus

I love this dish, especially at the Chinese restaurant whenever we have birthdays with grandma and grandpa. We would go to Tai San restaurant at this undisclosed location. We often go there at night and I would mostly be sleeping in the car due to motion sickness. And when I open my eyes, we would always just be driving into Tai San.

Come to think of it, people must have been richer then. We have cars and big houses. These days I can’t even afford a car or landed property. Have we improved or really become the new poor? We are more educated than our parents, but it seems we have lesser opportunities to break out of the poverty trap.

Anyway, the food at Tai San was always good. And we would always have our fill and family dinners were always about feasting and celebration. So this dish was always something that I would refer to as the menu filler. Scallops and Asparagus never really look like a main dish but more like a dish to make up the space in between great dishes. It was like a transitional dish to help make up the number.

It didn’t matter to me because I loved the dish as if it was a main. It was technically just as difficult as any of the other famous dishes to cook. If the scallops are not prepared properly, they would either be too raw or overcooked, and handling seafood is an art just like estimating the doneness in premium fillet mignon.

Here is my recipe for a very simple but delicious Scallops and Asparagus, hope you like it too.

Recipe

Ingredients

8-9 large stalks of Asparagus
6 large Japanese Scallops
2-3 Garlic (minced)
Drizzle of Light Soya Sauce
2-3 tbsp Olive Oil

Method

1. Shave the skin off the asparagus and sliced diagonally. Heat oil in wok, and fry the garlic until fragrant. Then throw in the asparagus pieces and fry at high heat. You want to create some gloss and be able to sear the vegetable.

2. Reserve the semi cooked asparagus and add oil again to fry the scallops. For this part, there is not much advice I can offer except that scallops cook rather quickly. Depending on the size you would want to moderate the heat in the pan. The end result you want to achieve is for the scallops to sear a little and to cook through.

3. Once the scallops are cooked through (most difficult part), add the asparagus back into the pan and continue to fry at high heat, add soya sauce and it should be just nice.

Bon Appetit!

Toast Box Mee Rebus (Review)

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Toast Box Mee Rebus (Review)

As a child I have loved the old school flavours of local delights such as the humble Mee Rebus. I don’t know where this dish originated from, maybe from the kitchen of some makchik or better still as a result of a mistake in someone’s haste to prepare dinner, and this new dish was discovered.

Whichever the manner it was created, we can only celebrate it by enjoying it. Which is what I am doing now. The one that Toast Box offers is by far one of the more consistent and easily available version. The sauce is thick and the ingredients are always superbly prepared. One of these days I am gonna make this dish and it will be the best and easiest thing to do.

But till then, I will continue to enjoy this yummy breakfast meal. Shiok!

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Eat until like that, buay shiok c kek ae!